Literary Criticism Between Individual Project(s) and a Collective Perspective

T most recent study published by Călin Teutișan, Scenarii ale criticii. Protagoniști, metode, interpretări [Scenarios of Criticism. Protagonists, methods, interpretations], changes the focus of the author’s interests. In Fețele textului [The Faces of the Text] (2002), Eros și reprezentare. Convenții ale poeziei erotice românești [Eros and Representation. Conventions of Romanian Erotic Poetry] (2005) and Textul în oglindă [The Text in the Mirror. Reflections of Eminescu’s Imagery] (2006), the literary critic was more interested in proofs of close reading across the history of poetic(al) forms or in different texts of Romanian or world literature. In his latest book, Teutișan pays attention to a so-called “sense of belonging to a community”.1 This community is defined not only by geographical parameters (i.e. the literary critical school from Cluj-Napoca), but also by common methods, original methodologies, inflections, peripheral complexes and so on. In fact, the originality of Călin Teutișan’s book comes precisely from the synthetic perspective that he has on this community of literary critics. Moreover, this overview pays tribute to the most important personalities that set historical or theoretical directions in literary studies: D. Popovici2, Ioana Em. Petrescu3, Liviu Petrescu4 and Mircea Muthu5. The study Scenarii ale criticii is the result of various contributions to these collective projects on “canonical” figures, although it should be noted that the author reexamines his own verdicts and amplifies them with assumptions regarding the contemporary Ioana Pavel