Abstract
This study aims to analyze the Romanian critical discourses of the second half of the 19th century and especially of the first half of the 20th century, starting from the central concept of “self-colonization”, coined by Alexander Kiossev. The article opens with the conceptual delimiting of the phenomenon imposed by the Bulgarian theoretician and with the hypothesis that Romanian culture can be attributed to self-colonizing cultures. The demonstration of this hypothesis consists of three arguments. The critical discourses belonging to G. Ibrăileanu, E. Lovinescu and C. Dobrogeanu-Gherea highlight, firstly, some of the characteristics of this self-subordination relation. The way the first two emphasize the role of imitation, the necessity of adopting the foreign models and the way Gherea treats the dependence upon the West under an economic report, represent, briefly, the center of the first part of the demonstration. The second one brings to the fore Mihail Kogălniceanu and Titu Maiorescu’s profiles, their discourses being characterized by clumsiness and flaws so typical for a culture found in an early stage of its development. The last argument broadens the scope of the demonstration in the sense that the analysis focuses on social and economic delimiting. The purpose of this delimiting is to establish which are the areas that are more responsive to the manifestation of the self-colonizing phenomenon.