The Cabinet d'amateur of George Perec
Abstract
In 1979 one year after the publication of La vie mode d’emploi, George Perec wrote Cabinet d’amateur. Histoire d’un tableau, in which he tells the story of a painting belonging to the genre of the cabinet d’amateur, also known as kunst- und wunderkammer. It is a collection of different paintings, usually belonging to a rich man or a notable, portrayed (once again) in a single picture celebrating the magnificence of this more or less real collection. As for the pictorial genre, so the short novel is the celebration of the images collected by George Perec in his previous masterpiece, La vie mode d’emploi. This is why I assume this work to be referable to the genre of structural homology more than to that of ékphrasis, being the pictorial structural not only the thematic inspiration or motif of the novel but its own underlying structure.
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