June 15, 2009
Mirela Roznoveanu is a well-known Romanian literary scholar, novelist, poet and journalist, who since 1991 has resided in the US, teaching at NYU. One of her major works published in Romanian is the two-volume The Civilization of the Novel: A History of Fiction Writing from Ramayana to Don Quixote (vol, 1, 1983; vol. 2, 1991). In 2008, this monumental work was republished in a revised one volume edition by the Cartex Publishing House in Bucharest.
Civilizatia romanului https://archive.org/details/civilizatia-romanului-2008-full-text
As the title announces, this is a wide-ranging history of the development of the novel as a generic structure, a cultural horizon of expectations, and as a narrative mode of representing different civilizational projects and paradigms: Oriental (Ramayana, Gilgameš, The Book of the Dead, the myth of Zarathustra, the Arab epics, the early Zen initiation narratives) and Western (the Judeo-Christian Bible, the Odyssey, the Greek protonovels, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the medieval romances, the Renaissance picaresque, ending with Rabelais and Cervantes). From the very beginning, the book emphasizes the multiple origin of the novel, focusing on the civilizational impact of this supergenre that traverses many different cultures, marking their moment of maximum development.
The method used is broadly comparative and interdisciplinary, covering an impressive range of cultures and narrative projects in a construction that, like the diversity of narratives covered, weaves a rich tapestry of possibilities rather than a singular evolutionary grand narrative. The very boundaries of the novel are continually challenged as the book casts its net widely, to discover epic structures both in the prehistory of the novel and in subsequent stages that defy easy summation under our more conventional definitions of the novel. The concept of the novel is thus returned to its multiform and undecidable origins. Roznoveanu’s recreation of these mixed roots can throw a new light on and explain many of the present mutations in the narrative genre through the incorporation of new technologies (hypertextual fiction, hypermedia and performative narrative, virtual narrative).
In the current context in which theorists of the novel and of narrative in general are struggling to accommodate the new forms of electronic narration, Roznoveanu’s book reminds us that the novel was from the beginning multilinear, illustrating an associationist and rhizomatic rather than a streamlined structure, and containing even multimedia elements, as in certain Oriental and Middle Eastern (Arabic) narratives that mixed verbal with visual text, message and ornament. Against our conventional expectations of mimetic/realist novels, Roznoveanu’s book draws attention to the much richer ontology of the proto-novel, mixing fantastic and realistic elements, philosophic and linguistic exploration, existential and cultural journeys. Structurally, the author suggests, the narrative tradition was no less multiform, mixing the large epic sweep with a spider-web or dispersed structures, under the sign of Arachne.
The author’s own method weaves together successfully many different strands, both theoretical (narrative and historical poetics, philosophy, literary and cultural theory, theory of science and communication) and practical. The type of comparatism she illustrates is truly global, mixing Oriental and Western paradigms to the point where the distinctions between them break down. The various narrative traditions sustain and modify each other, but they also bleed into one another, questioning conventional typologies of the novel.
In spite of the rich information in this book, The Civilization of the Novel offers an exciting reading experience, inviting the reader to explore the meandering history of the novel into many unexpected nooks and crannies, while allowing the reader to discover the larger patterns that weave this history together. Roznoveanu’s book presents a fresh view of the multiform history of the novel, maintaining the alternative paths rather than reducing them into a single evolutionary narrative that privileges the Western poetics of the novel. Both directly and indirectly, Roznoveanu’s book questions the dichotomous framework within which the history of the novel has been discussed, calling into question traditional definitions of Orientalism and Occidentalism and the novel’s need to clarify its cultural legacy by taking sides. The novel in her view remains hybrid, multicultural, always on the verge of negating itself, becoming something it was not supposed to be.
Once translated into English and/or French, this book will make a major contribution to the theoretical and historical reconstruction of our understanding of the novel and its hybrid legacy. Roznoveanu’s book displays astonishing erudition, imagination, and an incisive understanding of the intricacies of literary and cultural interaction. I hope that you will consider the possibility of publishing an English and/or French translation of this major attempt to rethink the origins and evolution of the novel along cross-cultural paradigms.
Dr. Marcel Cornis-Pope
Professor of English and Director of the Interdisciplinary PHD in Media, Art and Text
June 15, 2009
Marcel Cornis-Pope is Professor of English and Comparative Literature and Chair of the English Department at Virginia Commonwealth University. His publications include Anatomy of the White Whale: A Poetics of the American Symbolic Romance (1982), Hermeneutic Desire and Critical Rewriting: Narrative Interpretation in the Wake of Post-structuralism (1992), and Narrative Innovation and Cultural Rewriting in the Cold War Era and After (2001). He has also published numerous articles on contemporary fiction, narrative studies, and critical theory in journals and collective volumes. His current project is a multi-volume work (coedited with John Neubauer) entitled History of the Literary Cultures of East Central Europe: Junctures and Disjunctures in the 19th and 20th Century,” which explores East Central European literatures from a comparative-intercultural perspective, cutting across traditional national partitions. Vol. 1 of this work, on “Nodes of Political Time” and “Histories of Literary Form,” was published by John Benjamins Publishing Company in 2004. His awards include a Fulbright teaching and research grant (1983-85), an Andrew Mellon Faculty Fellowship at Harvard University (1987-88), a year-long Fellowship at the Institute of Advanced Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences (Wassenaar, The Netherlands), and the 1996 CELJ Award for Significant Editorial Achievement for his work as editor of The Comparatist.