The Novel of Transition: Subversive Temporalities in Early Postcommunist Romanian Literature

In this article I analyze the novel of transition as a subgenre of contemporary Romanian literature, arguing for its relevance in a discussion of how postcommunist literary works reflect the social reality of their time. Drawing on the notion of subgenre as it was defined by Franco Moretti, I focus on novels written and published in the narrow period between the 1990s to the mid-2000s by authors who experienced the transition and sought to render it in their literary works. My focus lays particularly on temporalities in transition and on how they are captured and subverted in literature. In contrast to the temporalities vehiculated by the most powerful ideologies of the 1990s, one conservative and the other future-oriented, the literature of the time creates a third temporality, a cautious and ironic one, which I call subversive temporality, given its evasiveness and disengagement with political realities. I conclude by proving that this literary behavior is both an aftereffect of the subversive strategies of the literature written in late communism, and a reflection of the feeling of disempowerment in the face of rapid, overwhelming social change.