MATEI CĂLINESCU AND “THE AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL DIMENSION OF REREADING”
MATEI CĂLINESCU AND “THE AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL DIMENSION OF REREADING”

Summary/Abstract: Published in 1993 in the United States, a country where its author, Matei Călinescu, lived and taught Comparative Literature since 1973, Rereading was translated in Romanian in 2003. Its topic and angle of approach were somehow surprising for the Romanian academic community, who knew Călinescu as a literary critic and intellectual historian, secondly as a writer, and less as a literary theorist. Our paper discusses Călinescu’s major concept of “rereading”, in an intercultural (American-Romanian) context, insisting on what the author calls “the autobiographical dimension of rereading”. We remind the fact that, after 1990, he wrote three major autobiographical (non fictional) books in Romanian: a volume of memoirs, in the form of a series of letters exchanged with his close friend, Ion Vianu, another volume containing selected fragments of his diary, and, last but not least, Portretul lui M, an impressive text dedicated to his son, Matthew, who died at the age of 26 and was affected during his short life by a form of autism (the Asperger syndrome). Each of these books contains various ideas, reflections and recollections that reflect the above-mentioned “autobiographical dimension of rereading”. Investigating their rich intertextuality leads us to the conclusion that the concept of rereading is much more than an(other) abstract theory belonging to a certain academic field.

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