Teorii interbelice ale specificului naţional în Europa centrală şi de est. Recitiri contemporane.

The interwar blooming of national characterologies, as a genre, was a fact not only for the Western, but also for the Central-East European cultures. Intellectuals from all countries of the meso-region engaged in a mimetic competition whose main aim was to more convincingly acculturate "central" models, importing cultural contents such as logical arguments, metaphors and clichés into their domestic repertoires. The most appreciated providers were less the 19th c. Romantic founders of the national discourse (like Herder and Fichte), and more the 20th c. authors of (para-)philosophical or (para-)scientific narratives of considerable commercial success, such as Hans Driesch, Leo Frobenius, Hermann von Keyserling, Ludwig Klages, Carl Schmitt, or Oswald Spengler. This paper looks into the comparative re-evaluation of the Central-East European interwar national characterologies, on the footsteps of the recent research conducted at the Centre for Advanced Study Sofia (C.A.S.). In the end, it also advances a proposition for a stronger collaboration between literary and identity studies, by showing that the complexities of the antimodern imaginary can be better addressed by looking into the literary strategies involved in the national characterologies. The example chosen to illustrate this approach is a brief analysis of Emil Cioran's national ontology, The Transfiguration of Romania (1936), and of the key-function held by the cognitive metaphor of the "leap" (or saltation) in his line of argument. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]