Corydon and the ambiguities of the text

• Grant number: 14/50559-7
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Post-Doctorate
• Effective date (Start): January 01, 2015
• Effective date (End): December 31, 2016
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Literature - Modern Foreign Literatures
• Principal Investigator: Guacira Marcondes Machado Leite
• Grantee: Renata Lopes Araujo
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Ciências e Letras (FCL). Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP). Campus de Araraquara. Araraquara , SP, Brazil

Abstract

Research intends to investigate some of the discursive ambiguities in Corydon, work of the French writer André Gide. Employing a large number of references to texts that are considered speeches of proved authority in several areas (such as Darwin, Havelock Ellis and Plutarch, among others); Gide wanted to give his defense of homosexuality seriousness and a scientific aspect. However, the presence of quotations and allusions in order to justify certain opinions and thus guide the reader’s ideas was denounced by the writer himself in several of this earlier writings, and this makes its use of other texts at least ambiguous. Although Gide has declared on severe occasions have written such a work without any aesthetic concern, with only the intention to make homosexuality was seen as something natural, the question of the role of literature and its relation to the real is present in text mode quite evident. Based on this assertion, studies of the work were and still are driven by a focused almost exclusively on sexual perspective issue, leaving a little aside the aesthetic work undertaken by Gide. Our goal is to introduce a different view in studies of Corydon, based on the analysis of the use of the inter texts. We want to show that some of the mechanisms whereby the writer constructs a discourse in which ambiguity would consist of making peremptory assertions and questioning its validity at the same time. While using the strategies employed in so-called discourses of authority, Gide contradicts their supposed truth and presents them as mere textual constructions. (AU)