Eugen Simion și dilemele morale ale criticii post-decembriste

Abstract

The first two decades that followed the overthrow of the political regime in December 1989 and the transition to the mentality and rules of a new society, a new mode of production were marked, in the area of literary criticism and cultural journalism from us, by a spectacular, dramatic change in the paradigm of interpretations. Aesthetic criteria were replaced by principles of revision, of false or real collaborationism, of the artificial concept of „est-ethics”, of political and ideological orientations, of the authors and not of the work. In this context, Eugen Simion remained consistent with his engagements on the side of aesthetics. What should have been a scientific matter has become, subsequently, a moral one. And the moral for which he campaigned in articles, in his works published during this period was that of objectivity. Without being apolitical, as he has been accused of, the critic has chosen objectivity as the only valid criterion, because, in essence, it meets the aesthetic. Today, more and more it turns out that justice was on his side, as well as other critics who supported, less declaratively, but applying it in their analyses, this principle.