Las figuras paradójicas de César Aira : un estudio semiótico y axiológico de la estereotipia
(2009)
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- Authors
- Supervisors
- Fabry, Geneviève
- Abstract
- César Aira (°1949, Coronel Pringles) is one of the most important and influential contemporary Argentinian authors. In opposition to the main tendency in the critical literature surrounding Aira's expansive literary work, this PhD wishes to distance itself from the writer's discourse on his own works, present in numerous of his essays and articles about other Argentinian writers (Arlt, Copi, Puig, Lamborghini, Pizarnik, etc.). One of the main gaps in the existing studies on this author is the question of the construction of meaning, which relies, in his texts, on the paradoxical balance between the lack of meaning and its simultaneous proliferation. How can we interpret a literary work that unceasingly disrupts our our hermeneutic expectations' How is meaning constructed in a literature that recycles, transforms and deconstructs most heterogeneous codes and topoi and continuously questions our reading hypothesis' In order to answer these crucial questions, we compiled a representative corpus of ten texts and we developed a model of analysis mainly based on Dufays's theory (1994). The modalities of appropriation and implementation of the several stereotypes were analysed, chiefly from a writing perspective (poetics of the author) but also from a reading-response angle in order to explain the effects and the controversy generated by this kind of literature. Our research focuses on four key themes : 1. The intermittent suspension of meaning in Aira's body of works can be explained in the light of the genre of nonsense (Carroll, Lear) which is defined by the disfunctioning of the hermeneutic paradigm (Menninghaus, Tigges). 2. Aira's texts constantly recycle and transform a multiplicity of codes, stereotypes and figures, which makes the play with stereotypes one of the key features of his literary work. On the one hand, the transformative potential of these codes determines the working of these fictions; on the other hand, the stereotype becomes the unavoidable mediator in the representation of a reality which always seems to escape (the sign of 'presence-absence' according to Gervais 2007). 3. The figure of the author, omnipresent in the different aspects of the 'autofictional space' embodies not only a principle of coherence but also of readability. Nevertheless, the desecration and auto-ironisation of these autofictional appearances challenge this very readability. 4. The ambiguity of the literary value of this work makes us ponder on its aesthetic purpose. We demonstrated that the continual problematisation of this value throughout Aira's texts consists in challenging the Kantian dialectic between 'genius' and 'taste'. Finally, this thesis is divided into four parts: alter a first theoretical chapter, the three following chapters are successively dedicated to the three kinds of stereotypes that we considered in the course of our research: mass-mediatical, cultural and auto-referential
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Citations
Decock, P. (2009). Las figuras paradójicas de César Aira : un estudio semiótico y axiológico de la estereotipia. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/36352