A personalidade de Calvin espelhada nas falas de Haroldo: um olhar freudiano do ato linguageiro nas tirinhas “Calvin e Haroldo”, de Bill Watterson

Abstract

This work aims to analyze, through the act of language, the personality’s representation of the character Calvin in the speeches of the character Harold, from the comics “Calvin and Hobbes”, by the American author Bill Watterson. The study starts from the following guiding question: Calvin's personality can be apprehended through Harold's speeches as an enunciating subject, produced by Calvin himself. The research aims to identify and describe the psychosocial subjects involved in the act of language in Calvin's comic strips, describe the actions and reactions of the speech protagonists, evaluate Haroldo's discursive behaviors as a constituent part of Calvin's personality, and point out the identity characteristics of the images constructed by the subjects in the act of language. The theoretical basis is formed by the studies of Freud (1923-1925), regarding topics on psychic instances, and Charaudeau (2008), with the postulates of Semiolinguistics. The corpus of the study is formed by three comic strips of “Calvin and Harold”, which portray the language interaction between the two characters. The methodological procedures of this study are descriptive, bibliographic, documentary and qualitative approach. From the enunciative intertwining that allows the apprehension of the images constructed by the subjects, it is possible to glimpse a regular enunciative behavior of the enunciating subject Calvin that brings him closer to the psychic complexes of the ID; the enunciating subject Haroldo presents an enunciative regularity that resembles the constitutive peculiarities of the Ego.