The publications of his early, "Romanian", years (c. 1961 – c. 1974) already indicate his ideological orientation. He drew from the traditions of Romanian thinking and criticism (Titu Maiorescu, Eugen Lovinescu, Tudor Vianu, and Lucian Blaga), and even more strongly from the aesthetic humanist doctrines of the "Sibiu Literary Circle" as articulated by Ion Negoiţescu, Ştefan Augustin Doinaş and others of the same group. These first publications dealt almost equally with Romanian, European, and comparative literature. Among them there was a book-length essay on structuralism (accompanied by an anthology), a selection of texts by Walter Pater, G. K. Chesterton and T. S. Eliot, and two volumes of collected articles (1971 and 1973).