Regimurile De Relevanță Ale Literaturii Sau Literatura Ca Regim De Relevanță Discursivă?

This study proposes a reconceptualization of literature—with specific application to Romanian literature—as a historically constructed, institutionally mediated discursive formation, rather than a timeless category defined by intrinsic textual properties. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s concept of “regimes of truth,” Galin Tihanov’s “regimes of relevance,” Bruno Latour’s Actor–Network–Theory, and the methodological frameworks of Franco Moretti, David Damrosch, and Mikhail Bakhtin, the article argues that literature functions simultaneously as a product of specific institutional arrangements and as a regime of discursive relevance in its own right—one that indexes, negotiates, and contests the very conditions of its production. The case of Romanian literature is examined as exemplary for the tensions between nationalist frameworks and transnational processes, with particular attention to two limit cases that challenge conventional classificatory logic: Romanian literature from Serbian Banat, a linguistic community marginalized within dominant national imaginaries, and the multilingual writing of Felicia Mihali, a Romanian-Canadian author whose work traverses Romanian, French, and English literary systems simultaneously. These cases are not treated as exceptions to be accommodated within existing categories, but as phenomena that demand a fundamental rethinking of the categories themselves—towards polycentric, transnational, and network-based frameworks for literary history.