A Literary Chronotope, the Road

This paper is the research dedicated to the chronotope of the road in Romanian literature. The road is not only a spatial category, but also a mythical-literary concept enshrined in literary works. The investigation perspective operates with the road as a spatial and temporal organism, capitalizing on its narratological areas.
The project aims to illustrate the literary transformation of the Road, based on the aesthetics and mythology of the Romanian space. Proving the durability of the road chronotopy is achievable through the exercise of identifying the Road with a space of initiation, travel, search for the center, built on the original myth, that of descent, rebirth, nostalgia, etc.
The symbolism of the Road - space-center - is characterized by sky, circle, forest (urban space), labyrinth (initiation space) or through the primordial elements (phenomenological): water, fire, air and earth to which history corresponds (age, memory ), name, faith and people (race, nation). Just as the universe cannot exist without its primordial elements, so a people cannot fortify its identity without a proper name, without a defining faith or history of its own. The road, the center of existence, is projected on a spatial-temporal axis.
In clarifying the phenomenon of road chronotopy, the potentials of the imaginary and identity architecture of the Road are analyzed, as it outlines the valences of the center. The applied model starts from considering the road to be a symbol of the reflection of the road-character, of the road-decoration, of the road-book, etc. Conceptually and methodologically, the work is presented through the mythopoetic and multidisciplinary interpretation of the Road, valid also for other chronotopes from the universal literature. The mythopoetic representations about the road were also capitalized by modern thinking, so that they determine the character of the chronotope and establish the type of texts (adventure novel, Bildungsroman, autobiographical or chivalrous novel, etc.) and their protagonist.
The structure of the paper highlights a theoretical part and a literary research part. The theoretical part revealed in the first chapter of the paper consists of information from literary theory, which we tried to crystallize into a coherent vision. The analysis was extensive, assuming an unusual interpretation of the chronotope through the prism of narratology, hence the concept of narrative chronotopia. The selection of the corpus of texts was constituted during the research of the concept of narrative chronotopy of the road, not according to the authors and does not propose a chronological perspective on the Romanian prose.
The present paper aims to open the possibility of detaching some solutions for examining the Romanian prose capable of stimulating the approach of other aspects, such as the establishment of paradigms in Romanian literature and according to the chronotopic forms.