ABSTRACT:
Rewriting is not at all a new textual practice, since one can find many literary works that retell old stories in Renaissance and French Classicism, not to mention the 18 th and 19 th centuries. Imitatio auctorum is, in fact, an ancient intertextual practice. Yet, rewriting in contemporary fiction means con-fusion of both texts and meanings and puts forth the problem of representation and identity.
My intervention will concentrate on characters in contemporary palimpsest fiction, that I consider double-coded signs. Sometimes, there is no need to retell a whole story, but merely mention simple names that bear with them the "burden" of a well-known story. When it comes to fictional characters, proper names function like abbreviations of different stories. If an author chooses a name like Ulysses for his character, this is definitely on purpose and such a name carries with it, within the actual narrative, the echoes of its former fictional contexts. There are narratives that bring together characters that come from different previous stories, that intersect for a short while within a text and the reader has to identify for each one its origin, its destiny or, to cut it short, its story.
Then there is the problem of who is reading such a text and how he/she is reading it. Can we therefore say that reading re-enacts a never-ending dialogue between different texts and different readers, a dialogue that takes place within the limits of a narrative?
These are only few starting points for a typology of rewritings and an analysis of what I call "the burden of culture" in contemporary postmodern and post-postmodernfiction.
