Autopoiesis.Textual procedures as User Guide to reading. Two paradigmatic cases: Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and André Breton’s Nadja
Autopoiesis.Textual procedures as User Guide to reading. Two paradigmatic cases: Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and André Breton’s Nadja

Summary/Abstract: The present paper deals with the binomial to read / to imagine and its taxinomic definitions in various aesthetic paradigms. The point of departure is the discrimination between mimetic and non-mimetic texts and the ways they are (semantically) tributary (or not) to the reference world. The focus is on the idea that the conversion of signifiers and the negotiation of meaning are guided by textual procedures. They act as operational instructions for the reader or, as I put it, a User’s Guide to reading. The more elaborated they are, the more intense is the autotelism, the narcissistic nature of a given text. The parameters of fictionalization are discussed contrastively using two aesthetic paradigms (Realism and Surrealism) and their epitomic examples (Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and, respectively, Breton’s Nadja). At the superficial narrative level, these texts actualize the theme of love (licit or illicit, euphoric or deluded, real or specious etc.); in the profound semiotic layers, these two entities are self-referenced. But, if the Realist work dissimulates its specularity, the Surrealist text is ostentatiously self-reflexive; the Realist art creates possible possible worlds, while the Surrealist doctrine is the recipe for the impossible possible worlds.

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