Deciphering the signs of intimacy: readings of Al Berto

• Grant number: 10/14456-8
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Master
• Start date: March 01, 2011
• End date: October 31, 2012
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Literature - Modern Foreign Literatures
• Principal Investigator: Annie Gisele Fernandes
• Grantee: Leonardo de Barros Sasaki
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil
• Associated scholarship(s): 11/24006-2 - Sweeping the ink body: literary estate and critical reception of al Berto, BE.EP.MS

Abstract

The work of Al Berto is inserted in an aesthetic framework which recovers a more emotional and sentimental poetic diction, places greater emphasis on the contact with immediate reality and narrows and blurs the limits between life and art. In order to clearly outline this context, we also evoke some questions such as the concept of authenticity, of sentimental and naïve poetry, or that of concurrence (or not) between poem and poetry, among others. One of the background issues related to these traits is intimacy or the writing of intimacy, which is full of tensions and dilemmas in the contemporary biographical space. The analytical structure of the dissertation is based on the two movements of the self-questioning intimacy: objectification of the subject and subjectification of objects. Thus, we primarily seek to discuss the notion of poetic narcissism and elucidate the process of constitution of the so-called "text-body" and its figurations: "small demiurge", "the seismic center of the world", "the nocturnal monk" and "the last inhabitant". Trauma and abjection are concepts that help us read the poems in this specific part of the study. Finally, we investigate the relations of the attentive and lonely poetic subject to his everyday objects - regarded as signs of reality and of the individual himself. We also articulate this analysis with the stylistic use of enumerations and inventories in a bivalent form: a) as an expression of the fragmentation of the world and another, and b) as a discourse of deconstruction and resistance. Hence, the structure of the dissertation should be considered in its complementary chapters: both deal with the writing of intimacy paradoxically and simultaneously regarded as presence and absence of the real, or as affirmation and denial of subjectivity, or even as assimilation and displacement of canonical writings of the self.

Academic Publications

(References retrieved automatically from State of São Paulo Research Institutions)

SASAKI, Leonardo de Barros. Deciphering the signs of intimacy: readings of Al Berto. 2012. Master's Dissertation - Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH/SBD) São Paulo.