Citation:
Date Published:
12 January 2021Abstract:
This article debunks a myth that has for more than thirty years linked two political projects of forming the New Man in the Soviet Union and in Romania: Anton Makarenko’s re-education of delinquents in self-supporting orphanages (1917–1936), described in his books The Road to Life and Learning to Live, and a re-education program from a Romanian prison, engineered by a legionary inmate, Eugen Ţurcanu — a program known as the “Pitești Experiment” (1949–1952). Discussing why Romanian historians directly connected Țurcanu’s re-education to Makarenko’s, based on the discoveries of historian Mihai Demetriade, my own archival research, and the analysis of historical accounts and memoirs, I demonstrate that in spite of sharing a few methods, the two projects differed fundamentally. My secondary goal is to elaborate on the unexplored implications of Demetriade’s findings via a Nietzschean reading of both projects, enlisting the history of ideas to emphasize the gap between the two projects.
October 2021: Arleen Ionescu is Tenured Professor of English Literature and Critical Theory at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Her major research and teaching interests are in the fields of literature, Critical Theory, Memory Studies, Holocaust Studies and Trauma Studies. She has published in reputed academic journals such as James Joyce Quarterly, Memory Studies, Oxford Literary Review, Parallax, Partial Answers, Papers on Joyce, Joyce Studies Annual, SLOVO, Style. She is joint-editor-in-chief (with Laurent Milesi) of Word and Text – A Journal of Literary Studies and Linguistics. Her books include Concordanţe româno-britanice (2004), Romanian Joyce: From Hostility to Hospitality (2014), The Memorial Ethics of Libeskind’s Berlin Jewish Museum (2017). She co-edited with Maria Margaroni (University of Cyprus) Arts of Healing: Cultural Narratives of Trauma (2020). At present she is working on a book project on the Shanghai Ghetto.