Disease, body and authority in the works of Caio Fernando Abreu and João Gilberto Noll

• Grant number: 16/13850-0
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Post-Doctoral
• Start date: November 01, 2016
• End date: July 31, 2020
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Literature - Brazilian Literature
• Principal Investigator: Arnaldo Franco Junior
• Grantee: Milena Mulatti Magri
• Host Institution: Instituto de Biociências, Letras e Ciências Exatas (IBILCE). Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP). Campus de São José do Rio Preto. São José do Rio Preto , SP, Brazil

Abstract

This research aims to analyze images of the body and of the disease, in the work of the writers Caio Fernando Abreu and João Gilberto Noll, in relation to both the context of oppression, of the military dictatorship, and the context after the political opening toward democracy. Our hypothesis is that the study of images of the body and of the disease, in the work of these two authors, allows us to understand a change of the way in which the State treats and controls the body as a political object in the passage of the authoritarian regime to the democracy. If in the previous political moment operated a regime of oppression which reached directly the body of citizens, more precisely, those of the ones opposed to the regime, through imprisonments, tortures, forced disappearances etc.; in the post-dictatorship context it is possible to observe a change in the way of an enhancement of the State to establish a policy of body control which does not use anymore the oppression, but a conjunct of actions that can be characterized as a biopolitics, understood here on base in the work of Michel Foucault. We intend to analyze this transformation mainly through the investigation of some recurring themes in the work of the two writers, such as the madness, the drugs and the counterculture, the physical oppression, the body divided between the suffering and the pleasure, the AIDS and the mutilation. To do so, we selected as corpus some short stories of Caio Fernando Abreu, from the books O Inventário do Irremediável, O Ovo Apunhalado, Pedras de Calcutá, Morangos Mofados and Ovelhas Negras, and then two texts from his Teatro Completo. From the work of João Gilberto Noll, we elected the short stories books O cego e a Dançarina and A Máquina de Ser, and then the novels A Fúria do Corpo and Hotel Atlântico. (AU)