Cult

... ISSN-1678-3182 Volume VII Número XXVI Jul-Set 2008 4 Reescrever no corpo dela a mini-biografia, revisitá-la em filmes, traduções, como seria? ... filho com ela? Teria nome de rei, dinastia dos Dinis, seria príncipe, navegador, bicha, poeta, bailarino? E depois, como seria? ...

DO CISNE AO PÁTHOS: UM PACTO?
O artigo examina emergências da subjetividade “angustiada” do poeta no colo contorcido de um cisne– como projeção do sujeito no poema, em vários autores, com algumas variações, configurando certa linhagem poética cujos sintomas vão da figura do exílio à figura do “estrago” ou da usura/gasto da palavra poética. Busca-se entender não uma projeção da identidade poeta/sujeito lírico, mas a dissociação que se opera quando o sujeito biográfico se autoconfigura num outro. Usarei para isso algumas lições de “A dialética do monstro, ou a contorção como modelo” (cf. Didi-Huberman, L´image survivante. Histoire de l’art et temps des fantômes selon Aby Warburg, Ed. Minuit, 2002).

The poem “O navio negreiro” (1868), by Castro Alves, because of its rhetorical power, has been read in Brazilian literary history as an artillery piece of the end of the nineteenth century abolitionist campaign. We do not intent to deny such obvious reading, but we will try to find, in the structure of the poem and in its exaggerated images, the actual axis of its oratorical power. Therefore we shall pay attention to the usage of hyperbole, in an open sense of the word, that reveals the horror of slavery as shown in the poem: on one side, extreme freedom, the immensity of the ocean, of the sky and of the desert; on the other side, the unspeakable, the impossibility, translated in the repeated pleas for the annihilation of such stain in the surface of skies, desert and ocean. The exaggeration caused by the hyperbole assumes thus its real rhetoric function, i.e. it moves partial dispositions – it causes the reader, along the reading of the poem, to establish an empathic relationship with the cause there expressed.

Inspired by the critical reading of Senhora, José Alencar’s novel, made by Roberto Schwarz in Ao vencedor as batatas, I  reconsider the ways of understanding the form of the Brazilian romantic novel, in order to reassess our comprehension of an intermediate between formal realism and the acceptance of a theory more radically romantic of the genre of the novel.

The concept of spontaneity is problematical to all romantic poetry, which searches for poetic sincerity but has to deal with the artificiality involved in all writing. The present short essay observes the oscillations between rhetorical exaggerated verses and other ones closer to a natural language in one of Álvares de Azevedo’s poems.

This article discusses the strategies used by Machado de Assis in his famous essay "Instinto de nacionalidade" (1873), not only to insert his literary production in the context of Brazilian literature of the time, but also to speculate about the future of a literature not based on Brazilian literary nationalism, or dependent on it. In other words: Machado's essay provides us, his future readers, with a special light over his own fictional work of years to come, since it proposes a principle of indetermination in order to individualise Brazilian literature, a principle that had depended, until that point, on the specifically Brazilian traits found in literary texts.

The polemical Fragment 216, published by F. Schlegel in the Athenäum (1798) journal, aligns, in the same value level, the French Revolution, Fichte’s doctrine-of-science and Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister. The fragment presupposes the scandal that such a combination could arise – and comes to the conclusion that the reader who could possibly understand this alignment of so diverse historic and cultural facts would be also able to see the revolution not only in the seismic movements of the populations, but also in books, the quiet keepers of the great changes of human thought. Therefore a more complete sight of the history of mankind requires, in Schlegel’s point of view, the acceptance of different “genres” (or forms) of the critical ability of contemporary men. The fragment itself, which carries such problematic alignment, could be understood as an ironic and complex form, because it states a kind of “truth” that could not hold itself under any logic or scientific exam.

Poe can be defined, in his extreme modernity, as a creator of literary genres, and not only the detective or scientific narratives or the modern horror tale. I am interested in examining a kind of genre very difficult to specify, bur easily recognizable to the frequent readers of Poe’s fiction: I mean tales that put together scholarly, literary, or philosophical references, in an unrealistic atmosphere, with the presence of unreliable narrators dealing with stereotyped horror plots, on the verge of the gothic narrative cliché. This would be, of course, a parodical genre, in which irony assumes its romantic face, i.e., a type of formal and generic irony. Therefore we can trace a problem between Poe’s fiction and its public: there is a popular reader, aimed by the magazines and newspapers which published Poe’s tales, that anxiously reads the plot towards its horror climax; and there is also a second reader, an analytical reader, mirror of the author himself, that searches through the lines of the text for the rereading of an stereotyped genre, only visible in the problematical neighborhood of very different elements. The marginal reading of the tale “Berenice” will guide this attempt to characterize a literary genre.

The present text reads the critical essays that M. de Assis wrote about some of the Brazilian romantic authors, in order to recognize his apprehension of the textual proceedings of this movement, which distinguishes the birth of the Brazilian literary identity. On the other side, the article tries to expose, in Machado’s critique, the development and the establishment of a theory of Brazilian Romanticism – a theory that perpetuates itself until today in our literary criticism.

The present paper examines some of the relations between the Greek-Roman mythical tradition and the European literary tradition in the poetry of Cláudio Manuel da Costa, pointing out the specific functions of myth and literature in the context of the neoclassical convention that characterizes the poetry of the author from Minas Gerais.