Moda ca formă de mimetism social în proza lui Camil Petrescu

Abstract

Camil Petrescu's interest in the issue of social mimetism was, almost inexplicably, overlooked by Romanian literary criticism, which seemed inclined to prioritize certain themes circumscribed by his theoretical interventions, which over time became canonical, dedicated to the novel of psychological analysis. However, what is ignored, beyond these aspects relevant to an aesthetic approach to literature, is the dialectical nature of the construction of Camil Petrescu's universe, where two worlds—the intellectuals and the socialites, whose repeated collisions are staged—look at each other with suspicion. Insufficiently theorized by the author himself, the phenomenon of social mimetism, whose most faithful form of manifestation is fashion, becomes in his interwar prose a genuine framework for reading social life and, further, modernity. Rereading his works through the lens of anthropological studies that gave rise to a true sociology of fashion, such as those written by Thorstein Veblen, Georg Simmel, or John Carl Flügel, Camil Petrescu's novels reaffirm the interest of this truly innovative writer in the observance, understanding, and fictional translation of the contemporary sensibility