THE EFFECT OF HUMOR AND IRONY IN THE CONSTRUCTION OF A CRITICAL DYSTOPIA IN MAFALDA
Critical dystopia. Humor. Irony. comics. Mafalda.
Is it possible to carry out a reading based on the critical dystopian principle in a genre that is not part of the literary tradition of critical dystopia? This is one of the questions that motivated the construction of this dissertation. In order to identify whether the Mafalda series establishes dialogues with critical dystopia and how the development of these dialogues is built within the narrative, through humor and irony. For this, I use as an object of study the series Mafalda, published by the Argentine humorist and comic artist Quino between 1964 and 1973, and which is diluted in the collections Toda a Mafalda, which brings together in a single volume all the strips officially published in the period mentioned, and Mafalda Inédita, who brings the strips that were censored and not officially published. To this end, my research is essentially structured on the theoretical postulates of Alves-Costa (2021); Baccoline and Moylan (2003); Barbieri (2017); Eisner (2005); Lima (2021); Moylan (2016); Queiroz (2012); Queiroz (2017); Ramos (2017); Ramos (2010); Survin (2015) among others. This study counts as a methodological procedure a bibliographic research, which allows the investigation of a theme from the material already published. To analyze the possibility of a reading of the Mafalda series from a critical dystopian perspective, firstly, it breaks with the patterns followed so far by verifying the existence of this critical dystopia in a genre different from the one traditionally studied, secondly, it provides an opportunity to verify the performance of this textual form under different perspectives from the usual and indicates that the reflexive effects promoted by critical dystopia are enhanced through the structure of comics, essentially characterized by the simultaneous use of verbal and non-verbal texts.