L’impossible retour : écrire l’exil postcommuniste dans la littérature roumaine francophone
L’impossible retour : écrire l’exil postcommuniste dans la littérature roumaine francophone

Summary/Abstract: Dumitru Ţepeneag’s novel Hotel Europa (1996) and Matei Visniec’s Despre sindromul de panică în oraşul luminilor (2009) have as protagonists writers that left Romania for France before 1989 and that become aware of the impossibility of either building a literary career in their adoptive country or returning to their native country after the 1989 Revolution. This paper sets out to examine a double experience of failure: personal (analysing the identity splits the experience of exile determines) and professional (both Hotel Europa and Despre sindromul... have a strong metafictional dimension, musing over the painful process of writing... in one’s mother tongue). However, I will argue that the two novels are the expression of a paradoxical come-back, as they mark the return of Ţepeneag and Vişniec to writing in Romanian.

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