Restrições formais, transcriação concreta e algo mais no Oulipo e em La Disparition, de Georges Perec

Abstract

The Oulipo (Ouvroir de littérature potentielle [Workshop of Potential Literature]) is a post-World War literary movement founded by mathematicians and writers amongst whom we find famous personalities such as Raymond Queneau, Italo Calvino, Georges Perec and Jacques Roubaud. The Oulipo is based on the formal constraint as a "machine" of artistic creation in two ways: on the one side, an analytical approach which studies "plagiats par anticipation [anticipatory plagiarism]", i.e., the writers who worked on the formal constraints before the Oulipo; on the other hand, a synthetic approach based on innovation and experimentation with new literary constraints. Firstly, this doctoral dissertation discusses concepts (implicitly or explicitly) presented in the manifestos of the group and in the critical texts and interviews with Georges Perec, concerning mainly the concept of constraint. Secondly, it discusses these notions in the work of Perec, including the lipogram novel La disparition (2009a [1969]). The heart of this part is to analyze the relationship between the discourse of the Oulipo and its immediate and visible effects in La disparition, therefore between constraint and aesthetic formalism. As theoretical basis, the concepts of metatextuality as proposed by Bernard Magné (1986; 1989), the death of the author as proposed by Roland Barthes (2004), intertextuality as proposed by Kristeva (2005) and reader as proposed by Wolfgang Iser (1996; 1999) and Umberto Eco (1991) are essentials, among others. At the end, extracts of La disparition translated into Portuguese by the author are presented, based on the theoretical work of Haroldo de Campos (2004), which considers translation as a device of critical appropriation.