Cărtărescu is the winner of the Romanian Writers Union Prize and the Romanian Academy Prize. One of the most important voices of Romania’s “Blue Jeans Generation,” his novels and poems have been defining elements of the country’s literature in the decades since Communism fell. Mircea Cărtărescu was born in 1956 in Bucharest, Romania. Cartarescu's exoticism is a chrysalis of our chimeric alter-egos.Add to Calendar 23:00:00 01:00:00 Blinding: a Bilingual Reading & DiscussionĬărtărescu and Cotter will present a bilingual reading of selected passages from Blinding (Archipelago Press, 2013) Bizarre and familiar, exotized Bucharest and exotized faraway lands have the consistency of dreams. For Cartarescu, eternity is simultaneity. REM is the Entrance to Blinding’s manuscript labyrinth centre and the portal to a higher 'blinding” reality.

Victor, the mirror-twin of Mircea, bound to him in a Narcissus-like story of love and abhorrence, is the embodiment of symmetry at its highest potential. Butterfly symmetry is the preservation of halves, simultaneity is androgyny. A realm where exoticism is preserved in its elements without having anything to do with commodities (see Huggan)is the dreamland of Mircea Cărtărescu’s writings.

The underlying paradigm superior/inferior attributed to exoticism is totally out of question in Blinding, because here all exotic representations are based in oneiric landscapes. Through exoticism and symmetry, Mircea wants to grasp his dream being, his inner dreamer. Exoticism appears in Cartarescu’s dreamland as the provocation, as the challenge of the Double. It is also interwoven in the maternal and paternal genealogies of Mircea, the alter-ego of Cartarescu himself. Exoticism embodies the need for another dimension. If Cartarescu, as a postmodernist writer, deconstructs some myths, he never does that to the all-encompassing myth of the book.

There is always an unescapable nostalgia from one metamorphosis to another. Summary/Abstract: In Orbitor (Blinding), Cărtărescu constructs and deconstructs the role of memory exploring memory’s relationship to immortality - mostly in the third book or father’s book, and memory in relation to creation - in the first two books, the mother’s book irrespectively the book of the self (the middle one). Published by: Editura Universitatii din Oradea Keywords: exoticism exotized Bucharest Romanian contemporary literature postmodernism Mircea Cartarescu alter-ego oneiric landscapes exotic couples butterfly symbol antipodes and symmetry labyrinth memory mise en abyme Monsu Desiderio in fiction EXOTICISM AND NOSTALGIA IN MIRCEA CĂRTĂRESCU´S ORBITOR (BLINDING)ĮXOTICISM AND NOSTALGIA IN MIRCEA CARTARESCU´S ORBITOR (BLINDING) Author(s): Dana Sala

Blinding mircea cartarescu