@book{publication-4145,
  year = {2018},
  publisher = {De Gruyter},
  isbn = {978-3-11-060294-4},
  series = {mimesis 71},
  edition = {1},
  url = {https://www.degruyter.com/view/product/504814},
  address = {Berlin/Boston},
  title = {Power and Literature: Strategies of Subversiveness in the Romanian Novel},
  author = {Florin Oprescu},
  abstract = {At the core of this book lies the relation between Power (as socio-political phenomenon) and the novel (as literary discourse). It shows that, in a society facing the excess of power in its various forms, novelistic fiction mediates knowledge about societal Power structures and uses specific strategies to subvert and denounce them.
The first part of the study is theoretical: it presents some of the most prominent theories of Power, from Plato, Machiavelli, Nietzsche to Weber, Dahl, Lukes, Parsons, Bourdieu or Foucault. After offering a critical approach to the concepts of Power defined in the social, political and philosophical fields, it articulates the relations of Power imprinted in literary discourse within a typology of four categories.
In the second part of the book, this taxonomy of Power is applied to four key novels in the context of Romanian “literary crossroads”, showing how novelistic fiction not only assume a critical and subversive position against the excess of Power, but also unveils our fragility when experiencing History.

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Contents
Argument 1
1 The Criticism of Ideas on Power
1.1 Theories on Power. From the Social and Philosophical Analysis to the Aporias of Literature 8
1.2 The Literature and its Battles on the Field of Power 26
2 The Active Power of the Subject
2.1 The Fanariot Power in XIXth Century. At the Doorway of Sunrise 58
2.2 The Writer at the Doorway of Sunset 75
2.3 The Old Parvenu at the Doorway of the Novel 82
2.4 Scenes from the Socio-political Life and the Hierarchization of Power 89
2.5 The Physiognomy of the Activist-Arriviste and the Gradual Instruments of Power 100
3 The Reflexive Power of the Subject
3.1 In Search of Power Authenticity 108
3.2 The Power of the Interwar Novelistic Canon 120
3.3 From the Literaturisation of the Autobiographical Trauma to the Reflexive Power 130
3.4 The Cinetic Anamorphosis of the Reflexive Power 146
4 The Passivity of the Subject faced with the Power of History
4.1 The Teratology of Totalitarian Power. The Romanian Case 162
4.2 The Most Beloved Man on Earth and the Passivization of the Subject, Faced with Excessive Power 176
5 The Impersonalization of Power in Contemporary Novel
5.1 The Memory of Power, the Power of Memory and the Narrative Typology of the Postcommunist Novel 198
5.2 The Impersonalization of Power and the Stigma of Historical Memory 226
Conclusions 245
Bibliography 252
Index},
  keywords = {Roman,Macht,Diskurs,Foucault,Bourdieu,Literaturwissenschaft,Rumänisch},
}
