7. What is the title of a story written by Andrei Codrescu?
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urnal Article Excerpt
Andrei Codrescu's Mioritic Space
by Richard Collins
It's through that hole, I thought, that I am returning to my birthplace.
--Andrei Codrescu, The Hole in the Flag
In the Romanian folk poem Miorita, a shepherd boy is warned by his beloved ewe, Miorita, that his fellow shepherds plan to murder him and take his flock. Instead of resisting, he accepts his fate, asking only that Miorita go in search of his mother and tell her the story not of how he was betrayed, but of how he was married to the daughter of a powerful King. Thereafter, wherever the ewe wanders, she tells the story--not the true, unadorned facts of death and betrayal, but a beautiful fiction of a transcendent wedding.
This simple story, told and retold in countless versions, is Romania's most enduring cultural text.(1) The popularity of the Miorita can be attributed to the power and simplicity of its poetry, but even more to its mythic structure. The myth has been used to define the Romanian character by several authors, including Mircea Eliade, who has called the "cosmic marriage" of the Miorita an example of "cosmic Christianity"--part pagan, part Christian, but in any case wholly Romanian--"dominated by a nostalgia for nature sanctified by the presence of Jesus."(2) But the most controversial concept of Romanian identity to be derived from the poem is the concept of "mioritic space" defined by the Transylvanian poet and philosopher Lucian Blaga.
For Blaga, the path of Miorita's wandering delineates what he calls "mioritic space," a geography of the Romanian poetic imagination, or, as one recent historian of the Romanians describes it, "a philosophical attempt to explain the Romanian spirit through the Romanian landscape, which [Blaga] saw as the stylistic matrix of Romanian culture" (Georgescu 205). Blaga's critics have charged that this concept has become a liability, nationalistic, escapist and fatalistic. For political analysts, Blaga has been criticized as a romantic aesthete, self-absorbed and disengaged from political realities, while pursuing a mystical communion with nature.(3) In this view, mioritic space is an escapist dream of a romantic nationalist that encourages political apathy. For ethnographers, it is a romantic distortion of the Romanian peasantry's connection to the land that ignores political and historical reality. These critics suggest that it may even account for the tendency of the Romanian people to suffer oppression passively: "one 'cause' of the seeming passivity of the Romanian population may be the fatalistic Weltanschaaung implicit in the Miorita" (Kligman 356). But to Blaga, mioritic space was simply a way of locating the Romanian poetic spirit.
All these theories and criticisms may seem like much ado about a boy and his sheep,...








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