Event Highlights: European Voices – A Reading and Conversation with Romanian Author Mircea Cărtărescu
On Wednesday, October 16, we resumed our European Voices series with the celebrated Romanian author Mircea Cărtărescu, whose visit to the US coincided with the publication by Archipelago Books of the first volume of Blinding, one of the most widely heralded literary sensations in contemporary Romania, and a best seller from the day of its release. The event was moderated by Cărtărescu scholar Delia Ungureanu, assistant professor at the University of Bucharest and visiting lecturer in Harvard’s Department of Comparative Literature.
Mircea Cărtărescu was born in Romania in 1956. One of the foremost contemporary novelists and poets of Romania’s 1970s “Blue Jeans Generation,” his work was always strongly influenced by American writing in opposition to the official communist ideology. Cărtărescu’s literary achievements have been recognized both nationally and internationally. He is the winner of the Romanian Writers’ Union Prize, the Romanian Academy’s Prize, and the 1992 nominee for the Prix Mèdicis, among other awards. He recently won the Spycher – Literaturpreis Leuk prize in Switzerland, one of the most important literary prizes in Europe. His previous novel Nostalgia was published by New Directions. He currently lives in Bucharest.
Delia Ungureanu received her PhD from the University of Bucharest in 2011. She is the author of Poetica Apocalipsei. Razboiul cultural in revistele literare romanesti (1944–1947) [The Poetics of the Apocalypse: The Cultural War in Romanian Literary Magazines (1944–1947), Bucharest University Press, 2012] and essays on canon formation and on modern poetry and poetics. She is currently working on a book project on oneiric literature as world literature, with a focus on world literary market strategies for going global for peripheral authors, including Jorge Luis Borges, Fernando Pessoa, Orhan Pamuk, Milorad Pavić, and Mircea Cărtărescu. This project will take Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of the national literary field onto an international level, following new concepts and theoretical approaches explored by scholars like Pascale Casanova and Giselle Sapiro.
Listen to an abridged version of the conversation on WBUR’s World of Ideas or watch the video of this event on BUniverse.