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This dissertation aims to study the Sermones y predicas del Cristo de Elqui and Nuevos sermones y predicas del Cristo de Elqui by Nicanor Parra as parodic and carnavalesque discourse. The theories of Mikhail Bakhtin and Julia Kristeva serve as instruments of analysis. As carnavalesque discourse the Sermones seek the liberation of language and its signifying possibilities, a liberating activity in keeping with the procedures of grotesque realism which underlies the discourse of popular culture. As parodic discourse the Sermones textually inter-relate with other discourses, thus becoming constituted on the bases of transforming precursor texts.
The first chapter, "La constitucion de las situaciones discursivas carnavalescas", shows the ironic play of masks between Author and Actor, a ludic activity that renders univocal meaning relative and points to transformations operative between speaker and addressee which are characteristic of carnavalesque discourse. The context of discursive situations demonstrates as well the interaction between the writing of the poems and their apparent orality as spectacle.
The second chapter, "La parodia carnavalesca", points up the intertextual relations between the poems and religious discourse, particularly the Bible, the sermon and the sermon's parodies, as ell as with mass media--radio and commercial announcements in particular. This intertextuality allows a contrast between an open concept of text as production (the Sermones) and a closed concept understood as univocal work (the Bible and the discourse of mass media).
"El significante carnavalesco", our third chapter shows the text operating at each of its linguistic levels (phonic, morphosyntactic and semantic) in order to acceed to signifying emancipation. Para- doxically, colloquial language, seemingly subjected to constraints of extraverbal conventions, emerges as the basis of liberating signifying discourse. The self-parody of colloquial language achieves that free- dom by reliteralization of colloquial language which allows deploy- ment of its poetic characteristics. These linguistic procedures always unfold around the transformational possibilities of the sign and correspond to carnavalesque mechanisms of duplication, inversion, and the grotesque.
Our "Conclusiones" extend the propositions proffered about these poems as carnavalesque and parodic discourse to the more significant part of the rest of Parra's poetic works.