Poiesis, aisthesis and katharsis: representations of the tragic in 21st Century Brazilian novels

• Grant number: 14/18300-3
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Post-Doctorate
• Effective date (Start): March 01, 2015
• Effective date (End): October 08, 2015
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Literature - Literature Theory
• Acordo de Cooperação: Coordination of Improvement of Higher Education Personnel (CAPES)
• Principal Investigator: Maria de Lourdes Ortiz Gandini Baldan
• Grantee: Eliane Soares de Lima
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Ciências e Letras (FCL). Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP). Campus de Araraquara. Araraquara , SP, Brazil

Abstract

This Post-doctoral project, to be put into effect by the Post-graduate Program in Literary Studies of College of Science and Letters of UNESP in Araraquara, as of the first of November 2014, intends to keep on the research - dedicated to examine the discursive process of configuration of the affective interaction established between the reader and the characters in the reading act - which is being developed since our Undergraduate Research Mentorship Program. This time, as we turn our attention to prize-winning Brazilian novels published in the beginning of this century, our aim is to identify and depict the different means of constructing the effect of tragicity in these texts, as well as the cathartic experience evoked in the reader. The idea is to associate the production to the reception in the analysis of the selected works, with emphasis not only on the aesthetic-discursive procedures (poiése), adopted in the composition of the narrative enunciation (evoked theme, forms of narration, construction of characters, ambience etc.), but mainly on the effects of meaning created, on its sensible (aisthesis) and affective (katharsis) impact force on the reader. Thus, rather than as action, the tragic is interesting for us as the idea that arises from the narrated story, as a form of portraying and interpreting the expressed narrative content. We are not proposing, thus, the analysis of the tragic as genre, but as an effect of discursive meaning produced in the moment of interpretation. (AU)