Eminescu, membru al Junimii. Posturi eminesciene în cadrul cenaclului

Many essential chapters in Mihai Eminescu’s biography are inextricably linked with Junimea, starting with the year 1870, when the writer first sent his poems to Convorbiri literare, and up to the end of his life. Nevertheless, there has been no systematic research so far on how Eminescu integrated with Junimea from a sociological perspective or on the contexts in which his social and/or literary performance reflected his belonging to the cenacle. In light of these observations, this paper aims to explore Mihai Eminescu’s personality as a member of Junimea, starting from the sociability patterns illustrated by the poet within the cenacle and using the recent studies on literary forms of sociability as a theoretical framework. I am interested in the postures that Eminescu embodied within his relations with Junimea, in the gestures and practices that he took up as a result of being part of this social environment, as well as in the influence of the poet’s both presence and absence on the dynamic of the cenacle. I will propose two directions of analysis – Eminescu as an in praesentia and as an in absentia member of Junimea – and I will outline the postures embodied by the poet in each case. My main objective is to circumscribe the two-edged sociological influence, of Junimea on Eminescu and of Eminescu on Junimea and, this way, to emphasize the human, sociable side of the poet’s personality, who followed a typical path for a 19th-century Romanian writer and embraced the ethos of a literary group.