BIOGRAPHIES RÉELLES/BIOGRAPHIES FICTIVES
REAL BIOGRAPHIES/FICTITIOUS BIOGRAPHIES

WHEN WRITERS BECOME NOVEL CHARACTERS

Summary/Abstract: Given as observational material the corpus of fictional texts offered by Sburătorul, the longest running literary circle within the Romanian space, which has functioned in Bucharest between 1919 and 1943 around the critic E. Lovinescu, we propose a reflection on how the writers become characters in the prose of their contemporaries. More specifically, we will take an interest on how the existence within the group – and the shared existential experience undertaken within it – influences the practice of the fictionalization as far as the biographies of the writers themselves are concerned. The Romanian case upon which we stopped proves an instrumentalization of these fictional biographies within the group. The "lives" are of no interest here as exemplary models; the construction doesn’t start from a myth; the means are not those of fictionalized biography. The presence of the writer is reduced to a few stuporous gestures, to several rigid and repetitive body postures, all of which are to be found in the scenography of the literary circle (attitudes of authority, manners of intervening in the discussion, voice quality and so on). Thus the presence of the writers seems to be a mere decoration – illustrations of the myths circulating within the community.

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