The Department of Romanian Literature, one of the two major departments in the faculty, with a current teaching staff of 30 members, includes several noted personalities in contemporary Romanian culture. Their academic interests extend from literary history (periods, authors, tendencies) to literary criticism and the theory of literature (genres, trends, poetics, stylistics). There are specialists who ensure the documentary base of research, by preparing indispensable critical editions and discovering new texts - while also dealing with the most general theoretical aspects of the discipline; and there are writers whose preoccupations centre on Romanian literature, but who are also concerned with the placing of this literature in a comparative context.
At present, the department includes the most competent specialists in the theory of reading, para-literature, old Romanian oratory, diachronic literary stylistics, Romanian romanticism, Blaga, Caragiale etc. There are important individual projects in progress - above all, the Critical History of Romanian Literature, of which the first volume has already been published. Recent years have brought about a new diversification of the fields of interest for specialists in the department, whose present concerns also include themes such as exile, utopia, the literature of Eastern Europe, and the re-evaluation of censured literature.
