Représentations de la Roumanie postcommuniste chez deux écrivaines roumaines d’expression française: Liliana Lazar et Irina Teodorescu

Abstract

Liliana Lazar and Irina Teodorescu are two French- speaking Romanian women writers who left Romania after 1990. In their host country, in this case France, they published several books in French, drawing on their personal life stories and borrowing elements from the cultural, social, and ideological system in which they had evolved up to the time of their departure. Through fiction, they return to their country of origin during a tumultuous period that they experienced and that prompted them to take action and exile themselves. By evoking the years that followed the fall of communism and the events of the long transition period that Romania underwent, these women writers weave links between the individual and the social by associating a space (Romania) and a temporal period (the years after the 1989 revolution). In their writings, the reader discovers images of the Romanian landscape, both urban and rural, and information about the actions of the people who live there. Therefore, in this paper, I rely on the social representation theory as the theoretical foundation of my research in order to analyze the books Terre des affranchis (Gaïa, 2009) by Liliana Lazar and Les étrangères (Gaïa, 2015) by Irina Teodorescu. My main aim is to investigate how post-communist Romania, characterized by the decline of a certain social reality and its replacement with another, is represented there as the result of two intertwined dynamics: one individual and the other collective.