LES MYTHES DANS L’ŒUVRE ROMANESQUE DE DUMITRU TSEPENEAG: L’EXPRESSION DE SON IDENTITÉ CULTURELLE

Abstract

The paper’s aim is to follow the metamorphosis of Romanian myths, mainly the myth of Mioritza, in the novels of Dumitru Tsepeneag, a Romanian writer exiled in France after WW II. It is important to see to which extent the source culture is reflected in his writings as an expression of cultural identity through myths in their quality as transmitters of cultural significance, talking about the Romanian soul, about a simple, pastoral lifestyle. From the Romanian folklore underlining the old myths to classical literature, the pastoral myth suffered modifications, mainly in the works of writers of the 19th and 20th centuries, and Dumitru Tsepeneag is one of them. A nonconformist writer, theorist of aesthetic oneirism in Romanian literature, this author has given proof of a permanent desire of literary renewal even under a totalitarian regime which undermined all literary experience surpassing the official canon, the one of socialist realism, which Tsepeneag tried to avoid. Being a precursor of postmodernism in Romania in the 1970s, through his textualist literary texts illustrating aesthetic oneirism, Tsepeneag’s creation is an expression of the nostalgia of origins – through the deconstruction of the Mioritza myth in a postmodernist manner, as a parody, constantly superposed on other myths, on differences, diversity, alterity, all discovered in exile.