University of Bucharest Review  Vol. III/2013, no. 1 (new series) Cultures of Memory, Memories of Culture   7    Bogdan Ștefănescu  REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS POST. REVISITING THE TRAUMA OF COMMUNISM IN STYLE 1 Keywords: national identity construction, discourse types, master tropes, Pray for Brother Alexandru, Constantin Noica, memoirs of communist imprisonment, irony, paradox, communism as colonial trauma, postcommunism and postcolonialism. Abstract: This article is part of a larger effort to explain national identity construction as any of four available discourse types informed by as many master tropes. I am looking at Pray for Brother Alexandru, Constantin Noica’s memoirs of communist imprisonment in order to show that rhetorical irony and logical/philosophical paradox are the tropological mechanism of coping with the colonial trauma of both Western and Soviet modernization. My discourse-oriented approach (a subjective variant of constructivist theories of nationalism) rests on the premise that (post)communism has been for the Soviet republics and satellite states a “softer” and more complicated form of colonization than that of Third World countries. Noica’s use of paradox is complicated by the internal dialogism of his narrative in such a way that it can be made to voice both a radical opposition to communism, capitalism, modern civilization and all received opinion, and also a philosophical contradiction or irony which he uses in order to convert defeat into victory and passivity into action, turning colonial history’s victims into victors. Paradox is, therefore, the rhetorical tactic of withstanding the effects of cultural colonization by total acquiescence, of adopting the vocabulary and stance of the colonial oppressor only to undermine and alter its very essence. This presentation is part of a larger effort to explain national identity as one of several available types of discourse formatted by means of a few tropological and ideological templates—very much like Hayden White has explained nineteenth- century historiographic discourse in Metahistory. This critical arsenal helps me identify the post-traumatic modalities in which literary memory reconstructs  University of Bucharest; Romania 1 This work was supported by the strategic grant SOP HRD/89/1.5/S/62259, Project “Applied social, human and political sciences. Postdoctoral training and postdoctoral fellowships in social, human and political sciences” cofinanced by the European Social Fund within the Sectorial Operational Program Human Resources Development 2007-2013. The present English version is the original and pre-print of the Polish translation to be included in the forthcoming proceedings of the international conference Histories, Societies, Spaces of Dialogue. Post-dependence Studies in a Comparative Perspective, 27-28 May 2013, Wrocław, a volume edited by Dorota Kołodziejczyk for Wrocław University Press.