Literature is Teratology: the aesthetics of Mircea Cartarescu's aberrant images

• Grant number: 21/01238-7
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Doctorate
• Start date: June 01, 2021
• End date: May 31, 2026
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Literature - Literature Theory
• Principal Investigator: Fábio Rigatto de Souza Andrade
• Grantee: Caio Vinicius Russo Nogueira
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil
• Associated scholarship(s): 22/06818-4 - The aberration of sensitive: on the images in Mircea Cartarescu, BE.EP.DR

Abstract

This is a research that aims to understand, through an immanent analysis, the aesthetics of images in the novel Nostalgia by contemporary Romanian writer Mírcea Crtrescu ([1993], 2018). Linked to the procedures of formal experimentation bequeathed by Modernism, Nostalgia, Mircea Crtrescu's first work in prose ([1993], 2018) proposes itself, at first, as a rupture from the romanesque genre as sedimented by the nineteenth-century tradition. Divided into five autonomous narratives, connected by its notably imagetic style in which the avowed presence, throughout the work, of modernist authors such as Marcel Proust and Max Blecher stands out, Nostalgia can be read from any of its parts. About the composition of images in Nostalgia, in the dialectic between form and in-form, we can circumscribe it, preambularly, in the anamorphic and aberrant way with which the Romanian writer describes the scenes and elaborates the visually oneiric and delirious atmosphere that runs through the whole novel. It is also worth noting the complex inter-art relationship, from visual arts to music to romantic and modern literature, woven throughout the novel's five narratives. With this panorama in mind, the intended analysis is based, above all, on the concepts and works of Gilles Deleuze, Georges Didi-Huberman, and Jacques Rancière. In this sense, we believe it is possible to problematize, through the material analysis of the formal procedures used by Crtrescu, the concept of literary image in a theoretical-aesthetic reflection that will seek, in the development of the research, to highlight the possibility of speaking of a visuality immanent to literary writing as the creation of sensitive images, i.e., affections and percepts. (AU)