La imagología literaria: una propuesta de aplicación

Literary research in the School of Modern Languages of the Universidad Central de Venezuela (UCV) has focused on the encounter with the Other and the relations between diverse societies and cultural manifestations. Imagology has proven to be one of the most effective theoretical-methodological approaches in our context, because it deals with the study of the relationships between the Self and the Other in literary texts. Of all the theoretical-methodological tools offered by imagology, we based our research on the method proposed by Daniel-Henri Pageaux (1994), which suggests a critical reading of literary texts structured in three levels: 1) lexical; 2) hierarchical relationships, and 3) argument or hermeneutical relationships. All these levels are presented and explained in detail throughout this article. To illustrate this method, we conduct a literary analysis based on Pageaux’s (1994) proposal of the short-story “The Eclipse” (1959/2007), by Augusto Monterroso, in the light of imagology and other complementary tools.