JOUER AVEC LE POÈTE EN PIERRE
PLAYING WITH THE STONE POET

Summary/Abstract: The present study focuses on a short story by Mircea Cărtărescu, Pieile [The Skins] (from the volume Melancolia [Melancholy], 2019), following the means of constructing poetic irony, on the thematic axis of a history about the initiation into literature, which offers a very rich gallery of images and metaphors for defining the literary lineage. Starting from Cărtărescuʼs characterization as one of the contemporary writers cultivating the most complex relations with his literary predecessors, a characterization that is often present in the scholarly literature, our reading aims to identify the new representational forms, offered by the text under scrutiny, of the descendance, influence, lineage and other “melancholic” situations which this famous contemporary writer now proposes, woven into a narrative whose classical patterns are, naturally, deceptive. From the literary cliché to the “melancholy of descendance”, irony settles in the space produced by the reading distance, in the interval between a new work and its models.

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