Literary Value

This paper looks into Romanian critic Monica Lovinescu's writings in order to identify the criteria she employs for the analysis of Romanian women writers after World War II. Covering mostly fiction and memorialistic literature, Monica Lovinescu played an important role in launching the careers of contemporary women writers, while also revisiting forgotten or marginal texts authored by members of older generations. Her value system brings together aesthetic and ethical frameworks that take into account the larger socio-political context which the writers relate to. Even though the critic's way of reading is not an explicitly feminist one, her analyses and hermeneutical technique still consider the writer's gender, especially as she thinks that Romanian women writers were often marginalized by male scholars who dominated the literary field during and after communism.

RÉSUMÉ – Si le babillard est celui “qui parle continuellement, et qui ne dit que des choses de néant” (Furetière), dans quelle mesure l’écriture babillarde peut-elle être une écriture du superflu, voire, du rien ? Écrire sur rien renverse les catégories axiologiques par lesquelles sont jugées les oeuvres littéraires au xviii e siècle, et met en évidence une des modalités du
babil : celle de revendiquer la vanité et la superfluité de toute parole.
MOTS-CLÉS – Babil, brochures, éloge paradoxal, riens

Bad literature is damned to oblivion. Focused mostly on valuable texts, our academic knowledge of the literary world is restricted to an extremely exclusive selection among its potential objects of research. Invariably, good taste filters literary materials in spite of its proven versatility in the course of history, and in spite of the instability not only of the canon of ‘great texts’, but also of the institutions in charge of its transmission. Consequently, texts of different sorts are discarded into darkness: failed and amateur works, venal writing, as well as literary forgeries and transgressions such as plagiarism. Bad literature includes most often pulp and popular literature (paraliterature) as well. Nevertheless, what if the rejected ‘bad taste’ was in fact similar to dark energy, which is invisible but probably predominant in the Universe?
The literary space allows a plurality of possibilities of existence, circulation and creation of value which are fundamental to the aims and scope of this conference. In sharp contrast to the well-established monumental landmarks of the High Literature, amorphous masses of neglected, despised or forgotten texts fall into darkness. However, ‘good’ literature seems to depend on the ‘bad kind’, at least as the necessary background –a dark, anonymous and heteroclite one– to exist and be valued. Besides this obvious role in the creation of value, what are the functions of bad literature in the whole economy of the literary system? Concerning our aesthetic criteria, which rely chiefly upon the available literary tradition, to what extent they are not the result of our predecessors’ judgements?