From the subject-author to the author-subject:crises of an announced death

• Grant number: 11/20756-7
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Post-Doctoral
• Start date: March 01, 2012
• End date: August 03, 2014
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Literature - Literature Theory
• Principal Investigator: Marcos Antonio Siscar
• Grantee: Rodrigo Silva Ielpo
• Host Institution: Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem (IEL). Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Campinas , SP, Brazil
• Associated scholarship(s): 12/11031-1 - Theorizations of a death: from the subject-author to the author-subject, BE.EP.PD

Abstract

The "death of the author", announced by Roland Barthes in a homonymous article in the late sixties , unfolded side by side with the "death" of the subject as conceived by the humanist tradition. However, the production of autobiographical texts in the second half of the twentieth century did not stop before this crisis. In addition, a number of critics alluded to a "return to the subject" in the last decades of the century, when studies about memoirs acquired historical prominence. That which would be a crisis of the crisis invites the problematization of these deaths. Accordingly, this study examines the works Un homme qui dort, W ou le souvenir d'enfance, La disparition e Quel petit vélo au guidon chromé au fond de la cour, books by Georges Perec in which the dramatization of the inscription of the Self in writings points towards an undecidability of the answer between death and ressurrection. In putting these polarizations in check mode, the ouevre of this French writer appear to inveigle us into a recovery of the so called "crisis of the subject" in its relationships with the field of the French literary theory in the aforesaid period, which was strongly marked by the so called tournant linguistique. In seeking to escape the mentioned oppositions, Perec's writings suggest the necessity of a theoritical fomulation of that which would configure itself as a passage towards a regimen of the author in which it would be necessary to think the impossibility of the subject as origin of the literary discourse beyond the despersonalization of the Self.