Mircea Cărtărescu’s Levantul. Foreground and Background Anthroponyms
Antroponimele în Levantul lui Mircea Cărtărescu

Summary/Abstract: The article focuses on the peculiarities of the anthroponyms in the poem Levantul by Mircea Cărtărescu in which the characters’ names are double coded, by amalgamation of names and parts of names borrowed from various literary works in Romanian or world literature. Names are built by overlapping the real world with the fictional world and are set at the congruence of the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. Characters’ names act either as flesh-and-blood representations (which I will call the level of foreground anthroponyms) or as cultural references, in which various etymologies from Greek, Turkish, Latin, Italian or French intersect (level which I will call the level of background anthroponyms). Thus, built with a technique similar to a painting or to a bas relief, Levantul, which is by no means a Borgesian library, proposes a parodical recapitulation of the concept of literature.

• Details
• Contents