Resumo

GIORDANO, Alberto. Cortázar / Felisberto Hernández: razones de un desencuentro. Cuad.Sur, Let. [online]. 2003, n.32-33, pp. 239-248. ISSN 2362-2970.

This paper is supported by the hypothesis that the "self-portrait" strategies used by Julio Cortázar in his critical work, showing images of himself in his essays, turn out to be "self-praising" at a certain point. We will read the essay-prologue "Felisberto Hernández: Letter in person"(Carta en mano propia") in order to make evident how the fact of experimenting with his subjectivity, which is the essayist's task, deteriorates into dramatizing the eccentric character of a writer who is supposed to be exceptional. The contrast between Felisberto's genuine strangeness, the character-narrator, and the "cronopio's" stereotyped strangeness, together with the evaluation of the different intensity used by each writer to tell about his childhood, are an attempt to show that Cortázar, instead of reading Felisberto's melancholic literature, reduces it to his festive ethos of the eccentric writer, in order to make it his own with a "self-praising" aim.

Palavras-chave : J. Cortázar - Felisberto Hernández; Critical work; Self-praising.