Literatura – artă mnemonică
Literature as Ars Memoriae

Summary/Abstract: This present paper discusses the mnemonic character/function of literature as it is revealed by two types of contemporary novels –biofictions (fictional biographies of famous authors, included in a world or national canon) and rewritings (literary texts which recreate/rephrase valuable and well-known books). The paper presents a series of terms used by researchers in the field of the cultural memory: mnemonic imagination, mnemonic products and practices, stabilizing factors/catalysts, mnemonic art, memory places. Biofictions and rewritings are spurred by mnemonic imagination, as long as they resort to imagination and memory in the process of writing and reading. Furthermore, these two types of novels can be defined as memory places, because they (com)memorate and celebrate authors and literary works from the world or national heritage. Generated by mnemonic practices, biofictions and rewritings are mnemonic products and they are meant to bring to attention past cultural values already acknowledged, yet sometimes threatened by contemporary oblivion. These novels reestablish the placeof the canonical writers and works in public memory and culturalconsciousness, as they mediate the readers’ encounter with thegreat writers from world literature and they recalibrate the understandingof the past. Hence, the two species widely spread in thecontemporary literary field support the fact that literature is amnemonic art.

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