THE DIALOGICAL SELF AS A MARK OF POSTMODERNITY IN MIRCEA CĂRTĂRESCU'S NOSTALGIA
THE DIALOGICAL SELF AS A MARK OF POSTMODERNITY IN MIRCEA CĂRTĂRESCU'S NOSTALGIA

Summary/Abstract: This paper analyzes the way the dialogical self manifests itself in Mircea Cărtărescu’s Nostalgia and in two novels by Thomas Pynchon: Vineland and The Crying of Lot 49.There are two perspectives from which we can look upon things, in Bakhtin’s view of the dialogical self: the ethical, unfinalizing one, and the aesthetic, finalizing activity. This is how the literary tradition is used with Cărtărescu. We find the "ethical" perspective upon the self in Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, and the second one is visible in the aestheticized self of Mircea Cărtărescu's characters in the novel entitled Nostalgia. I will also discuss the dialogism of Thomas Pynchon's novel Vineyard, set in the polyphony of the sixties. The dialogical self puts forward, unlike the views of the cultural periods preceding postmodernism, a positive evaluation of time, as the time of construction, the time for constructing a self, like a story. This self will no longer be objectified, the self seen as a work of art will be, on the contrary, considered pretendership. Instead, what the dialogical self presupposes is a self always on the making, always contributing, at the same time, a creative perspective upon the world and upon the others. The dialogical self is the self that goes beyond postmodernism, post-postmodernism, in its perpetual dialogue with what traditions might assume. If for postmodernism the dialogical self is one among the others (the decentered, fragmented self, the self as creator of reality, the carnivalesque self), the dialogical self is the main form of identity put forward by post-postmodernism. It is the cultural instance where we go beyond postmodernism, since the dialogical self no longer implies fragmentation and rupture, which were the main traits of postmodernism.

• Details
• Contents