Autonomy, post-autonomy and civil responsibility in contemporary prose: the case of Ricardo Lísias

Abstract

In modern times, art has become a field of autonomous discourse that indirectly affects the social reality from which it feeds, without ever being confused with it. That is why literary expression was usually legitimized as the other in the pamphlet, because whoever speaks in the work is never the author, just as the universe of fiction never reproduces the social reality. However, a certain borderline contemporary prose that challenges the notion of autonomy, together with the theoretical debate about what is called "post-autonomy" (Ludmer, 2007) or an "ambiguous pact" (Alberca, 2007), has called into question this place of art as a field of experimentation apart from so-called real life, in order to more directly implicate author and narrator, reality and fiction, which seems to put the notion of free creation and civil responsibility for the work in another context. In the discussion, we will reference the novel Divórcio (2013) and the narrative Delegado Tobias (2014), both by Ricardo Lísias. Our purpose is to speculate whether, in this investment in ambiguity, there is a new discursive strategy capable of replacing the modern paradigm of autonomy or whether it just reiterates it.