The Representation of Death in the Literary Work of Anton Holban Cover Image

REPREZENTAREA MORTII ÎN OPERA LITERARA A LUI ANTON HOLBAN
The Representation of Death in the Literary Work of Anton Holban

Author(s): Adriana Teodorescu
Subject(s): Literary Texts
Published by: Editura Universităţii Petru Maior
Keywords: death; representation; ontologization; aestheticization; cremation

Summary/Abstract: Although recognized as a primary theme in Anton Holban’s literature, death was touched on as a collateral matter and sometimes with certain flimsiness by reviewers. Our goal in this study is to investigate the means of death representation in Anton Holban’s literary work from a double perspective – literary and thanatological. Using literary analysis and critique, and relying on some anthropological and philosophical theories, the present research demonstrates that there are two poles of literary representation of death in Holban’s literature – a literary-aestheticized (on which previous critical analyses were focused) and the existential-ontologized (neglected by those analyses), poles between which field of power it is necessary to discuss the binomial relationship love-death, specific to holbanian writing. We examine as well the features of death literary representation and its significant patterns: symbolized death, imagined death and narrated death. An innovative and difficult element of this study, assuming the incompletion, is tracing some lines between Holban’s literature – under the sign of self-fiction – and the alleged decision of writer’s cremation through the analysis of some literary representations of death that could be reflexes of a cremational imaginary.

  • Issue Year: 2012
  • Issue No: 13
  • Page Range: 95-114
  • Page Count: 20
  • Language: Romanian