138 Caietele Echinox, 38/ 2020: Planetary Spaces Marius Conkan Transgressive Spaces in Contemporary Romanian Poetry: A Geocritical Approach Abstract: Transgressivity is a major geocritical principle that is fundamental for the morphology of global spaces. Following this theoretical frame, my paper will map out the images and states of transgressivity that arise in contemporary Romanian poetry. How does poetry create transgressive spaces in the context of a post-communist society? Which are the poetic cartographies involved in the process of cognitive, afective and heterotopic mapping of Romanian post- Communism? Finally, how does poetry become a territory of freedom that subverts a given socio-political geography? These are the starting points of my geocritical approach on transgressivity which can be characteristic to the “chronotopography” of post-communist spaces and their poetic representations. Keywords: Geocriticism; Romanian Poetry; Transgressivity; Afective Mapping; Postmemory; Heterotopias; Rhizomatic Spaces. Marius Conkan Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania mariusconkan@yahoo.com.sg DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2020.38.11 Introduction I nfuenced by the theories of F. Jameson, H. Lefebvre, M. Foucault, G. Deleuze, D. Harvey, E. W. Soja (and other philosophers), spatial analyses of literature have increased in the last decades, in the context of post- modernity, globality and posthumanism. 1 Human geography, geocriticism (B. West- phal), 2 literary cartography (R. T. Tally Jr.), 3 literary geography, quantitative analysis and digital cartography (F. Moretti) 4 attempt to defne the relationship between real spaces and their aesthetic representations, following the paths of socio-political phenomena. For Westphal, “geocriticism will work to map possible worlds, to create plural and para- doxical maps, because it embraces space in its mobile heterogeneity,” 5 while for Tally Jr. the process of “mapping narratives” involves two types of cartographers (the writer and the reader/ interpreter) who chart, in a dynamic and creative tension, “the real-and-imagined spaces of human experience.” 6 In this sense, “transgressivity,” “multi- focalization,” “geocentered approach,” and “referentiality” (as translated from French by R. T. Tally Jr.) are the main theoretical