THE ARTIFICIAL PARADISES OF DES ESSEINTES, A DECADENT ESTHETE

In the late nineteenth century, the discoveries of the unconscious universe and the fondness for mysterious dimensions of existence have influenced a group of young artists to probe world mysteries through the incantatory power of words. From the opposition to scientific Realism and Naturalism, and also inspired by the revolutionary poetry of Charles Baudelaire, thus arose Decadentism. The novel À Rebours, by the French novelist and art critic Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848-1907), is an important expression of that spirit. In that work, there is a fruitful dialogue between painting and literature, which inaugurates a new style opposing the already exhausted realistic model. Duke Des Esseintes, the eccentric protagonist of the novel, struggles to modernity and emerging bourgeoisie’s unrefined taste of emerging bourgeoisie. In his searching for a new literary model, Huysmans bet on environment descriptions and art transpositions. The painting served as an aesthetic paradigm for the novel construction, not limited only to the frequent descriptions of Moreau or Redon’s paintings, but also encompassing the way Huysmans described the furniture, tapestries, artificial flowers and fishes, book covers etc... Being outstanding was his idea, things beyond the reach for the common man, devoted to trivialities of everyday life. The transposition of art, or the creation of an artistic work by language, acquires immeasurable value to the critical Huysmans engrossing him in À Rebours. There, the critical superimpose the writer. The decadent style of Huysmans opposes the analytical reason. In his work, the art aims to retake the passion, the dream, the mystery, fear, death, totally disengaged of the desire to represent the reality.

PROBLEMATIZATION OF REZEPTION STUDIES ON THE SEMIOLINGUISTIK THEORIE

Over the past decades the Discourse Analysis (DA) has attempted to solve articulation problems between the psycho-sociological dimensions of the subjects involved in the language act and the linguistic dimensions that characterize this act. Likewise, it has been a systematic challenge for Humanities to establish a conceptual link between the plans of actor and the psychosocial framework that encompasses it. The results of this endeavour have revealed, however, that the psycho-sociological dimension had been underexploited in DA, since the individuals involved in this instance (Communicating Subject and Interpreting Subject) are abstract and imagined constructs based on their recovered identities, purposes in the act of communication and socially consolidated practices.