The issue of the integration of values from national literatures within the global literary canon cannot be reevaluated without taking into consideration the dynamics of the Romanian avant-garde. In order to determine the outline of this global communication of values, one must grasp the modernity of the national literary production, as well as the dialogism characteristic to writers within the European context at the beginning of the 20th century. Through a comparative perspective that highlights both the proximity of influences and specific differences, this paper is an attempt to provide a selective and synthetic representation of the Romanian literature of the avant-garde, with an emphasis on the development of utopian visions, similar to those that emerged within Constructivism and international Futurism. Within the context of the European avant-gardes, the manifestos and theoretical writings of such authors as Ion Vinea, Ilarie Voronca, Geo Bogza, or Mihail. Cozma, appear as an affirmation of a cultural identity expressed through the visionary tendencies of the movements, poetic ideologies, and aesthetic doctrines. Each literary movement (whether Italian, Russian, or Portuguese Futurism, Dadaism, Surrealism, or Romanian Integralism) puts forth a novel and transgressive way of relating to tradition, world views, empirical modernity, and the problems of the self and language. Therefore, literary manifestos shape and impose a theoretical construct, a utopian or revolutionary vision, with a teleological sense rendered through an infallible rhetoric, through an agonistic internal structure (with past and future being engaged in an ongoing competition, with literary canons and traditional models, masterpieces and classical authors, being deprived of trans-temporal nobility, desecrated, deconstructed, and parodied). However, the manifestos of the avant-garde supersede a deeper cultural crisis, expose a concealment or demystify a "wounded," alienated, or eccentric identity (as, for example, the Dadaist buffoon, a quixotic and tragic subject, cf. Serge Fauchereau). It is in the scope of this paper to identify some characteristics of the utopian visions that are to be found in the manifestos of the Romanian avant-garde through the study of structural and rhetorical invariants, through a poetics of discourse. While such visions may appear as untimely and inopportune, they nevertheless serve a legitimacy function within the field of cultural production.
