An Englishman in Romania:

An Imagological Reading of Mike Ormsby’s Never Mind the Balkans, Here’s Romania

Résumé

Connecting back with an already well-established tradition of scholarly explorations of images of Romanianness, as emerging from (non)fictional representations of crosscultural, Anglo-Romanian encounters, the present paper focuses on one of the most recent textual productions foregrounding an English traveller’s gaze on his Romanian hosts, namely Mike Ormsby’s collection of short stories Never Mind the Balkans, Here’s Romania (2008). Applying an imagological grid to it, the paper aims at
providing evidence in defence of the idea that, at least after 1989, the English observers’ attitudes towards and, implicitly, textual mirroring of Romania have undergone significant changes. In doing that, it reflects upon the ‘game’ of auto- and hetero-images at the heart of the narrative discourse as meant to point to both an awareness of cultural differences and the need to overcome cultural biases in one’s mind with a view to successful intercultural communication in the context of globalisation-driven societal
transformations.