The Worldedness of Postmodernism in the Romanian Literary Field:A Traveling Concept

In spite of its alleged outdatedness, recent enquiries in World Literature Studies have not completely neglected the concept of postmodernism. On the contrary, they emphasized its “worldedness” and transnational characteristics. Building on this perspective, I approach postmodernism through Mieke Bal’s Travelling Concepts in the Humanities: A Rough Guide, framing it as a “traveling concept” whose diffusion in East-Central European culture — precisely the Romanian context — merits closer examination. This investigation focuses on its interactions with coeval literary concepts within the world-literary system. Using this framework, the article argues that Romanian postmodernism, a category discussed by Mircea Cărtărescu among others, served as a legitimizing theorization. In this regard, it was pragmatically employed to counter the (semi-)peripheral condition, and to act as a heuristic battleground between two fields of knowledge production on literary postmodernism: French and American.