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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.Īuthors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms: Cărtărescu uses hyperbole, metaphysical parody, and a maximalist surrealist imagination to propel the discussion of socialism and cultural peripherality beyond the dated parameters of the East/West dichotomies.ĭoris Mironescu, 'Alexandru Ioan Cuza' University of IaşiĬopyright (c) 2021 Doris Mironescu, Andreea Mironescu This option is influenced by the author’s biography, as well as by his own relationship with the memory burden of socialism in today’s post-Cold War world.

In order to describe this narrative structure as an emergent subgenre of the postmodern maximalist novel, we coined the term ‘maximalist autofiction.’ We then discussed Cărtărescu’s option for maximalist autofiction and the effects this literary choice has had on his representation of Romanian late socialism.

The novel is an ample, paranoid, metaphysical, and counterfactual autobiography that uses a late-communist backdrop to create a metaphorically skewed representation of the self and the world. This article studies the fictionalization of late Eastern-European socialism in contemporary Romania, namely the literary projection of the 1980s in Mircea Cărtărescu’s autofictional novel Solenoid (2015). Maximalist autofiction, counterfactual autobiography, Romanian late socialism, surrealism Abstract 'Alexandru Ioan Cuza' University of Iaşi

Solenoide de mircea cărtărescu