Pelos dedos de Alice: o jogo das histórias e a fluidez da linguagem em Salman Rushdie e American McGee

Abstract

The turn of the last years has once again brought about the dangerous though inevitable fragmentation of territories as we knew it. Wars and invasions, as well as the economic crisis in Europe and the United States of America, have emphasized our gaze upon the perception that in a world where the acceleration of reality creates new means every day borders are naught but imaginary. As a result, this is not only applied to the physical grounds, but also to the grounds of ideas. Paving our way from this unstable setting, we focus on two objects: a novel by Salman Rushdie, Luka and the Fire of Life (2010), and a video game, Alice Madness: Returns (2011), by American McGee. The aim of this thesis is thus to analyze the constitution of the translated subjects in two ultimate points: the fluidity of language and the voices of the discourse. As we may notice, these topics will influence both the formation of the authors and their artistic inventiveness as well as the discussion on the cultural identity in the chosen works. This formation, loaded with authorial masks, creates an effect of ironic discoursive neutralization in these productions. Therefore, they are essential for us to analyze the postmodern writing of Rushdie and McGee: de-centered, plural, and contradictory. Because of that, they become the protagonists on a stage, language – a product of complex relations embodied on power. Through a mixture of old and current stories – which may be canonized or not by institutions or companies – these migrant authors create a postmodern revival of various themes and stories in texts that are hybrid in their texture: crossing, thus, several language codes, fields of knowledge, and media languages.