Cenografia, ethos e autoria: uma abordagem discursiva do romance The picture of Dorian Gray

Abstract

The main objective of this paper is to show how a discursive approach of the literary phenomenon, as it was understood by Dominique Maingueneau (2006), can bring new contributions to the treatment of the literary object. The material for analysis consists in the only novel written by Oscar Wilde The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890-91), published in 1891. The book constitutes a masterpiece of aestheticism-decadent and presents a particular vision of the artistic phenomenon. What will be taken from this material as a corpus of analysis are some set designs built in the novel as well as the speech of the character called Lord Henry, especially when he talks to the character of Dorian Gray. The concept of ethos is highlighted in this work. We have chosen to deal with it by approaching the features which form it, due to the fact that our hypothesis is the one that the construction of Lord Henry s ethos is a result of his hedonistic position in the novel. It was from this relation that we established the central hypothesis of this work, namely the category of the ethos allows us to relate Lord Henry s hedonistic position in the novel to the aesthete-decadent position of Oscar Wilde in the literary field. However, while we tried to analyse the ethos in a literary discourse we could observe that the question was in fact much more significant. We could not ignore the questions inherent in the literary object itself. For this reason, we bent our efforts to the question of the enunciation scene, the authorship, the writer s position in the field, on the status of the literary discourse, its constituent and paratopic character categories which explicate the epistemological place in which this work is inscribed . From our perspective, the literary fact is neither approached as text nor as context; in the same way, the preoccupation is not how one goes from text to context or from context to text. Differently, the literary fact is approached as an enunciative event and it will be in the theoretical-methodological proposal of Dominique Maingueneau, as already presented, more specifically in her book Discurso literário, that we will find support for this kind of approach.