DES EFFETS RHETORIQUES OU DE L’HISTOIRE DANS LA LITTERATURE
RHETORICAL DEVICES OR ON HOW HISTORY ENTERS LITERATURE

Summary/Abstract: Rhetorical Devices or On How History Enters Literature. Starting from an ampler reflection on the ways contemporary Romanian literature addresses its recent (dictatorial and traumatic) past alongside its murky and indefinitely-subject-to-transition present, the following study focuses on the prose of a great writer, Radu Cosaşu, and on the rhetorical strategies he resorts to in order to figure (and, by the same token, disfigure) History. Consistently ironic vis-à-vis political ideologies, his literature lures history into a rhetorical trap where it can expose its ideological inconsistencies by means of writing, revealing History's indecidability and suspending the compulsory ideological choice by means of dilemma-ridden poetics. Literature is written in the absence - and on the absence - of the substance of ideological options at "the end of history". Quite atypical for current Romanian literature, Radu Cosaşu's rhetoric solution addresses just as ironically the figurative functioning of language in general.

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