Work · Life & Existential Philosophy
The Mioritic Space
Interprets Romanian folk culture through an unconscious “stylistic matrix”: the undulating space of hill and valley named after the ballad Mioriţa.
Introduction
“The Mioritic Space” appeared in 1936 and was later included in Blaga’s “Trilogy of Culture” (1944). Its title comes from the ballad “Mioriţa”, in which a shepherd, warned by his ewe that he is to be murdered, accepts his death calmly and imagines it as a cosmic wedding. Blaga reads this and other forms of Romanian folk culture – songs, the wooden church, peasant ornament, an attitude toward fate – as expressions of an unconscious spatial horizon: an undulating plane of hill and valley, a rhythm of rising and falling. Together with other “abyssal” categories this horizon forms a “stylistic matrix” that shapes a culture without its bearers being aware of it. The book became one of the most cited texts on Romanian identity; critics read it as a poetic morphology of culture rather than an empirical theory and have warned against its nationalist use.
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