L'Ecriture de la mort dans l'oeuvre de Cioran

Abstract

<p>The thesis attempts to explore and analyze the characteristics of the writing of death in Cioran' s texts. Living in France smce 1937, the Romanian-born French writer E.M.Cioran has established a significant position for himself in contemporary French literature. He has been considered one of the greatest French stylists while his contribution to the development of the contemporary essay has o~en been compared to Beckett's contribution to the renewal of the theater in postwar France. The first part of the study is an inquiry into the sense of death that oriented Cioran' s aphoristic writings from beginning to end. I try to describe the crisis of metaphysics and language that influenced Cioran' s -writing, as well as the possible links between his essays and a particular Romanian feeling for death. On the other hand, I also connect Cioran' s writings with the sense of death that characterizes contemporary examinations of discourse in the period after 1960, in France. In the second part of the thesis I attempt to formulate a typological description and analysis of Cioran' s essential modes of expression, the essay and the aphorism. My intention is to examine the feeling of death as a generator of style through an analysis of Cioran' s fundamental texts. The thesis ultimately suggests that in Emil Cioran's work, the feeling of death represents a direct challenge to the legitimacy of literature. Is Cioran a great metaphysician of death? Or is his writing in revolt against the sterile rationalism of the metaphysical revolution that followed the Enlightenment? Should we, then, reconsider his thought and style as a post-modernist expression of the feeling of the end? The present study does not claim to answer these questions, but merely to suggest a few paths that could lead to a better understanding of the writing of an important contemporary French writer.</p>