The authorial presence in Finisterra, by Carlos de Oliveira

Abstract

Movements such as russian formalism, new criticism and french structuralism argued that criteria such as author and intention should be abolished from the critic horizon to establish the condition of objectivity necessary for the scientific study of literary works. However, ultimately, our experience of readers continues to tell us that such criteria play an important role in building the meaning of works. In this brief analysis of Finisterra, by Carlos de Oliveira, a complex narrative, which at first sight weakens the signs of authorship, we propose a “intermediary way” for the author category approach, avoiding, on the one hand, what W.K. Wimsatt (1946) calls intentional fallacy, “which sustains the author’s intention as a criterion for any valid interpretation of the text”, and, on the other hand, what Paul Ricoeur calls “fallacy of the absolute text”, that is, “the treatment of the text as an entity without author” (RICOEUR, 1976, p. 42).