The Narrative of Clan Clustering in Two American Novels

• Main Author: Onoriu Colăcel
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: unknown
• Published: 2017
• Subjects: tribalism; Romania(n); West(ern); narrative; North Atlantic
• Online Access: https://zenodo.org/record/495126; https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.495126

Bruce Benderson’s The Romanian (2006) and Andrei Codrescu’s The Poetry “Lesson” (2010) promote a somewhat clannish agenda, enduring in story telling despite the pluralistic kind of society the North Atlantic mainstream culture pledges to build. Way too diverse in kind and nature to be safely defined, this view of the world readily available in Western narrative fiction accounts for much of the bias still displayed presently by the novel genre. Explicitly, the cultural backdrop of (Eastern) otherness against which the plot unfolds is the litmus test of the professed inclusive values of the cosmopolitan Westerner. The metropolitan cultures’ competence in policing the civilizational divide between the many worlds available inside and outside the American-European cultural continuum shows through the pages of the books. For example, the two English-written novels dwell on the marginal Romanian identity in order to narrate the world-making patterns of fictional invention. The American Bruce Benderson employs extensively the stock language of orientalism, while the American-naturalized Romanian Andrei Codrescu touches on the identity narratives of his home country. Conclusively, I find that both narrators largely exemplify the value-laden language of narration in terms of instrumentalizing the ethos of the E. U. enlargement and the European heritage.