E. Lovinescu between Marcel Raymond’s De Baudelaire au surréalisme and Hugo Friedrich’s Structure of Modern Poetry
In this paper, I shall discuss the relations between the works of Romanian literary critic E. Lovinescu and two major seminal books on European modernism written by Marcel Raymond and Hugo Friedrich. Therefore I shall follow and debate the idea of Modernity seen as a (dis)continuous relation with what is called Tradition.
In putting into practice his idea of an aspirational synchronicity of Romanian literary field towards Western conceptual apparatus, Lovinescu tried to borrow and assimilate French methods and ideas, despite the almost virgin Romanian soil in what concerns a strong literary tradition: hence the mixed aspect, ingenious yet sometimes contradictious, of many solutions Lovinescu improvised.
Despite Lovinescu’s debts to French school of literary criticism, his oeuvre is in reality much closer to Hugo Friedrich’s vision on a discontinuous poetical modernism than to Marcel Raymond’s historical unifying concept.
Keywords: E. Lovinescu, Marcel Raymond, Hugo Friedrich, istorie literară, modernism, tradiţie, continuitate, ruptură