The Revolutionary Force of the Periphery: The Levant, Nostalgia, and World Literature

The December 1989 Revolution that overthrew the Communist regime brought Romanian literature back on the international literary market and dramatically changed the conditions for production and circulation. However, there was a lively circulation of foreign literature through translation into Romanian well before 1989. Here I will argue that Mircea Cărtărescu’s two major texts written in the late 1980s—the verse epic Levantul (The Levant) and the poetic novel Nostalgia—can be seen as works of world literature through their intertextual dialogue, even though they were created with no expectation that they would ever circulate through translation beyond national borders. With their intertextual rewriting in an ironic and parodic manner, Cărtărescu’s works have been presented abroad as landmarks of Romanian postmodernism, but this essay argues that Cărtărescu’s manner of rewriting is closer to the nostalgic, serious, and constructive rewriting found in radically modernist texts. Cărtărescu’s The Levant and Nostalgia illustrate Pascale Casanova’s point that the revolutionizing of literary practices comes from the periphery of the literary field. This was doubly so during a politically controlled period that allowed Cărtărescu to choose his intertexts in the absence of any strategic hierarchy that would please the center and free from any expectation of gaining recognition from the world literary space.