La evolucion del grotesco en la dramatica de Armando Discepolo.

Abstract

This study focuses on four plays written by the Argentinian playwright Armando Discepolo (1889-1971). Thus, the purpose of this dissertation is to analyze Discepolo's works--El movimiento continuo (1916), Mustafa (1921), Mateo (1923) and Stefano (1928)- from the perspective of the grotesque seen as a socio-historical and aesthetic category. To that end this dissertation combines modern semiological analysis of drama--a study of the action, characters, scenery and language--with the socio-historical approach. As an aesthetic category the grotesque experiences a change which involves a process of transformation and deepening within the four plays studied, from one play to the next and it moves from the grotesque seen as an aesthetic category that combines two opposite characteristics in El movimiento continuo to a feature that is present in every single part of the structure and the world vision of the play in Stefano. In these four plays Discepolo uses the grotesque as a fundamental organizing element. The grotesque is a major feature that shapes the totality of his work in which he depicts the process of immigration at the beginning of the century in Argentina. As a result, his plays can be read as a commentary on the everyday conditions of poverty and suffering experienced by immigrants that came to Argentina expecting to conquer the New World hacerse la America and found in the process of adaptation to a new urban life misery, pain and frustration that affected their lifes and those of their families. Discepolo's work evolves as does the grotesque. Both move from the external world into the individual consciousness. Just as the grotesque changes from one writer to the other, the conception of the grotesque changes as well from one period to another. Thus Discepolo uses a transhistorical concept in order to present the problems of the immigrants, problems possessing different characteristics but ending in the same manner: in failure.