Abstract: Ideology in Perspective – Mihai Iovănel’s Historical Approach. The History of Contemporary Romanian Literature by Mihai Iovănel brings back into question the present of Romanian literature both in terms of content and methods of analysis. In the present paper, Socaci dwells on the ambivalence between a materialist view and a critical one in the traditional sense—that is, one whose main function is to judge—with the aim of showing the limits of the socioanalysis that the author proposes. Considering the critic as a key player in the literary field and whose positioning is subject to complex schemes of perception, Socaci analyses the implications of the assumed but unquestioned subjectivity in the construction of the proposed overview, with an emphasis on the symbolic violence manifested by insufficient argumentation or by exclusion. Socaciʼs approach values concepts proposed by Pierre Bourdieu and other sociologists of literature, thus indicating that the contradictory dispositions of the critic work together to produce a methodologically eclectic work, as it proposes an analysis of external factors, but not of the subject placed in the role of the analyst. However, the scholastic discourse that does not question the perspective from which it is constructed fortunately contributes to the actualization of the literary present, by establishing a rapport of retroactive historicity (Jérôme David), in which novels (Mara) or literary postures (Dobrogeanu-Gherea, Ibrăileanu) are legitimized by their role as precursors of some critical directions and artistic movements present in Iovănel’s contemporaneity. Thus, the proposed overview is in the service of a structural, sociologically aware analysis, and can therefore be considered a founding block in the necessary accumulations towards a national grand récit, similar to the one proposed by Pierre Bourdieu in Les Règles de lʼart.

Keywords: literary history, sociology, literary postures, symbolic violence, subjectivity