From Ideological Literary Criticism to the Educational Status of Literature in the 1950s

Since it is an important element of the literary text's existence as aesthetic unit, the language of the literary work provides a significant number of arguments for establishing the latter's degree of artistry. Maiorescu's principle of placing aesthetics before ethics, which characterizes Romanian education before 1948, stops working after this date, when literature, both in terms of its creation and of its critical interpretation, is brought under political control and placed in the propagandistic service of the single party. Our paper aims to analyze this change in perspective and the contextual causes that generated it.