O alianță literară. De la critica biografică la întoarcerea autorului

In the milieu of interwar Romanian modernism, Șerban Cioculescu showed a particular interest in the making of literary biographies, which in the post-war decades resulted in a self-styled version of biographical criticism. This article follows the avatars of a heated debate developed in 1970-‘80s around the life and works of writer Mateiu I. Caragiale, involving, on the one hand, Alexandru George, Alexandru Paleologu, and N. Steinhardt, and on the other, Șerban Cioculescu and Eugen Simion. While the former group claims a textual hermeneutics devoid of biographical speculation, the latter supports the revival of biography-based analysis. Eugen Simion finds in Șerban Cioculescu’s approach a valuable ally, while preparing his book Întoarcerea autorului (The Return of the Author, 1981), to defy the mainstream anti-biographical orientation of Romanian criticism, and reintroduce, in the spirit of French theory (like Jean Starobinski or Serge Doubrovsky’s), the figure of the author in text interpretation.