National Plan for Research, Development and Innovation 2007-2013, PNII. Evaluation for project proposals for the 2011 funding call of The Romanian National Council for Scientific Research.1."ROMANIAN LITERARY ONOMASTICS: NAMING, IDENTITY AND INTERCULTURALITY" 2.“The Saint of Montparnasse” between Document and Myth: a Century of Brancusian Exegesis.

1. The project Romanian Literary Onomastics: Naming, Identity and Culturality is motivated by the fact that literary onomastics has recently gained a growing scholarly recognition. In Romania, this topic has been less studied than non-literary proper nouns. The project proposes a monographic study on literary onomastics and focusses on inventorizing and analizing the onomastic fund circulating in the Romanian cultural space, as reflected in the 19th and 20th centuries Romanian fictional prose. The social-cultural context of creating different types of literary names will be investigated, as well as the manner in which proper names can reflect a fashion in a certain historic epoch, traces of cultural heritage, allogeneic influences, or the way the author relates to a particular movement or to his/her characters. The research will also consider the relationship between proper names, which constitute themselves as identitary marks at social, national or European level, and literary names borrowed by means of permanent/temporary globalization phenomena. The aim of the project is to elaborate a monographic study, based on a research activity consisting of selecting, inventorying and classifying a corpus of representative Romanian prose texts. Another objective of the project is to form a team of researchers whose scientific field of interest is connected with the proposed topic,thus promoting a model of an interdisciplinary study. 2. The starting point of my project is the Barbu Brezianu archive, bequeathed to the Institute for Art History, containing mostly documents (books, periodicals, correspondence, drafts, press clippings, photographs) related to Brancusi’s (called “the Saint of Montparnasse” by his friend writer Peter Neagoe, author of the book with the same title) work, which needs to be studied and organized in order to become easy of access to a larger public. The analysis of the documents themselves will be corroborated by the team of researchers with the larger problematic of the reception of Brancusi’s work and its shifting interpretations, taking into account the changing historical context during a century. As such my topic refers to the history of art history and aspires to a better understanding of the conventions mediating between viewer and art work. In the forefront of my proposal stays the cleavage between Western and Romanian Brancusi’s critical posterity during communist period. Contrasts and meeting points will be emphasized, taking into account also the rich correspondence exchanged by Barbu Brezianu with well known art historians and artists. Brancusian exegesis is seen as a dynamic object, but at the same time as an ever-developing enrichment of the meanings of the work itself. Not the least objective is to distinguish rigorously between serious and innovative critical analysis and the plethora of shallow ones.