The Seance of Reading. Uncanny designs in modernist writing

The essays gathered here for the shared purpose of conjuring the uncanny return of archaic building-rituals in modern literary works began as a series of guest-lectures that took place in various Romanian universities over a period of several years. I owe my regular visits to the country that has become the center of my professional life since retiring from Washington College in 2013 to The Romanian – U. S. Fulbright Commission, whose offer of an appointment as a Fulbright Scholar brought me to the University of Bucharest in the Fall of 2014. Weekly meetings with the students who participated in the master’s seminar that I offered there were crucial to the gradual shaping of a project that has now achieved its final form – a process that, in the words of William Butler Yeats, involved “much stitching and unstitching,” especially because I wanted the completed work to seem, again with Yeats in mind, the expression of “a moment’s thought.” Among the many Romanian colleagues who invited me to speak to their students, I would like especially to thank Diana Banea, Ilinca Diaconu, Elena Ionescu, Rodica Mihaila, Roxana Oltean, Ioan Panzaru, and Lidia Vianu of the University of Bucharest; Ovidiu Matiu, Ana-Karina Schneider, and Gentiana Stanisor of Lucian Blaga University; Ruxandra Cesereanu and Simona Jisa of Babes-Bolyai University; Mihnea Dobre of the University of Bucharest’s Institute for Research in the Humanities; and Gabriela Toma of The National Museum of Romanian Literature.