Acknowledgements
The epigraphs come from Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outline & Critical Writings; Svetlana Boym’s essay titled “Human Error”; George Steiner’s Real Presences.
Carmen Bugan’s poetry and scholarship was central to this exploration of selfhood as constructed across languages and biographical forms. I am deeply grateful to her. A few sections of this work appeared as essays for the Poetry Foundation blog and On the Seawall, and I owe Shoshana Olidort and Ron Slate my eternal love and gratitude for their encouragement and editing. They are treasures in a world that has forgotten how to love and behold one another.
The following books are referenced directly or indirectly, in some shade or fashion:
Aciman, Andre. Homo Irrealis: Essays. New York: Macmillan, 2021.
Azoulay, Ariella Aïsha. Potential History – Unlearning Imperialism. Verso, 2019.
– – . Civil Imagination: The Political Ontology of Photography. Verso, 2012.
– – . The Civil Contract of Photography. Zone Books, 2008.
Blanchot, Maurice. The Writing of the Disaster. Translated by Ann Smock.
Boym, Svetlana. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books, 2001.
Bugan, Carmen. Burying the Typewriter: A Memoir. New York: Graywolf Press, 2012.
Bugan, Carmen. Poetry and the Language of Oppression: Essays on Politics and Poetics. Oxford University Press: London, 2021.
Bugan, Carmen. “My Archival Identity”, PEN Transmissions, 2013.
Cixous, Helene. Stigmata: Escaping Texts. Oxfordshire: Routledge Press, 1996. See “Preface: On Stigmatexts by Helene Cixous,” as translated by Eric Prenoqitz.
Derrida, Jacques. Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan. eds. Thomas Dutoit, et al. New York: Fordham University Press. 2005.
– – . Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International (New York: Routledge, 1994), 10. As quoted in the section on hauntology.
Duras, Marguerite. Me and Other Writing. New York: Dorothy Project: 2019. See essay “Flaubert Is” for quotations.
Földényi, F. László. Melancholy. Translated by Tim Wilkinson. United Kingdom: Yale University Press, 2016. For Foldenyi’s discussion of the painting, see pages 126-131.
Friedman, Jack R. “Furtive Selves: Proletarian Contradictions, Self-Presentation, and the Party in 1950s Romania.” International Labor and Working-Class History, no. 68, Cambridge University Press, 2005, pp. 9–23, http://www.jstor.org/stable/27673000.
Gansel, Mireille. Translation as Transhumance. Translated by Ros Schwartz. New York: Feminist Press, 2017.
Gray, Carmen. “Director Radu Jude is harnessing old propaganda to celebrate Romania’s forgotten dissident heroes.” Calvert Journal. 10 March 2020. Online.
Grigorescu, Ion. Box (1978). Alternately known as Ion Grigorescu – Box / Boxing (1977) All stills included from the film were taken by the author.
Grigorescu, Ion. Ion Grigorescu Dialog cu Ceausescu / Dialogue with Ceausescu (1978). All stills from film taken by the author.
Hirsch, Marianne and Leo Spitzer. Ghosts of Home: The Afterlife of Czernowitz in the Jewish Memory. University of California Press, 2011. See page 193 for description of “backshadowing glance.” See page 196 for “reparative reading” and questions about parents’ fond memories of Czernowitz.
Jude, Radu. “Uppercase Print.” Directed by Radu Jude. Big World Pictures, 2020.
Preda, Caterina. “Forms of Collaboration of Visual Artists in Communist Romania of the 1970s–1980s.” The Hungarian Historical Review, vol. 4, no. 1, 2015, pp. 171–96. Art critics often found themselves in the position of serving as unintentional collaborators who offered the “safe to exhibit” stamp. Critic and author Pavel Susura recalls being summoned to Securitate to give a report after any artistic gathering or exhibit. Susura was also called there repeatedly after being denounced for listening to Radio Free Europe. See page 182.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. See also p. 143, where Sedgwick describes”the impossible first person—such as the first person of someone dead or in the process of dying,” as a common sentimental marker in literature.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading; or You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You.” Collected in Touching Feeling. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002. pp. 123-151. Accessed online at https://www.ias.edu/sites/default/files/sss/pdfs/Critique/sedgwick-paranoid-reading.pdf
Shimoda, Brandon. The Grave on the Wall. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2017.
Steiner, George. Real Presences. Chicago, Chicago University Press, 1989. Print.. See page 160 for discussion of rhetoric.
Steiner, George. “Language Under Surveillance: The Writer and the State,” 1986. Steiner wrote this essay in response to the choice of words used to title a PEN panel, “The Writer’s Imagination and the Imagination of the State.” The title presumed that these two imaginations could be separated, and Steiner lamented this simple dichotomy characterized by bad grammar and an aroma of “morose compromise.” Capitalist markets respond to financial censors, as media caters to profitable pop which “corrodes “and “trivializes”.
Vatulescu, Cristina. “Arresting Biographies: The Secret Police File in the Soviet Union and Romania.” Comparative Literature, Vol. 56, No. 3 (Summer, 2004), pp. 243-261.
Vatulescu, Cristina. Police Aesthetics: Literature, Film, and the Secret Police in Soviet Times. United States, Stanford University Press, 2010. There is also an extensive examination of how Securitate managed cinematography for propaganda, as in the example of the 1959 film, Recunoștea, which focused on Monica Savianu; see pp. 187-9 for details. See page 21 for more on Mandelstam.
Zagajewski, Adam. “Inspiration and Impediment.” The Threepenny Review, Winter 2012, No. 128, pp. 12-14. Online.
