genius loci pt. pdf.qxd - ROMANIAN LIBRARY

The fable of the Lone Path
Elements of „apocrypha cultural history“
Towards the end of the year 2004, I thought of gathering several
researches elaborated long time ago and therefore to form a
sort of preliminary essay to some possible „elements of apocrypha
cultural history“. The purpose of this action was not that of providing
a savant bibliography with another title, bibliography that is already
representative enough, but rather to show a way of looking
at the mystery of survival of some cultures that, in a world that tomorrow
might become disgustingly uniform, underlines still the right
to variety, to the autochthonous answer, to the specific interrogation.
By the nature of my major preoccupations, it was inevitable for me
to reveal here „the Romanian case“ but, at the same time, I realized
that this might become a model and an example of possible
method when studying any culture of „Tiers-Monde“. Therefore,
mutatis mutandi, these principles could be understandable and
maybe they could help to the establishment of some potential solutions
for Bucharest, Montevideo, Tunis or Delhi, meaning wherever
the mechanisms presented here are found in various proportions.
The studies that form that small synthesis of cultural history
were written and published in Romania between 1984 and 1989,
in French, and they describe several „astral hours“ of literature at
the Lower Danube ("the proto-Romanians“, „the Isihast Renaissance“
of the century XIV, the era of Brâncoveanu in literature and „the
beginning of the prophetic Reconquist"). They represent fragments
of a much larger research, but they have a certain autonomy of their
own, and an existence of their own. Two of the cases are actually
the first attempts (and the only ones at this time) of historiographical
synthesis of the „definite period“ and, as a consequence, they
have the value of „pioneer work“. The Romanian intellectual shall notice
the cases where the conclusions of other savants are continued and
to what extent they are developed and sometimes even surpassed.
For the foreign savant, such themes certainly represent a strange
matter. This potentially astonished attitude is first of all due to the
method. In this work I tried to eliminate the „universalistic chronology“
and „the canonic periodization“ established by most of the „histories
of various literatures“, (usually the European ones) and used,
by extension and most of the times inappropriately, in the cases of
all literary histories.
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