The corporeity of the poem: a reading of Ana Cristina César

• Grant number: 16/17559-9
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: January 01, 2017
• End date: November 30, 2018
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Literature - Literature Theory
• Principal Investigator: Viviana Bosi
• Grantee: Fernanda Morse Valente Castro
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil
• Associated scholarship(s): 18/08331-0 - The Old Paris is Gone: the work of Ana Cristina Cesar in transit, BE.EP.IC

Abstract

We intend to investigate how Ana Cristina Cesar works her concerns by adding a physical dimension to the writing, which would be related to a desire that her poetry could reach the reader not only intellectually, but also bodily. Whereas the poet experiments writing as proposed Rolland Barthes (2003) by saying "(&) to know that writing compensates for nothing, sublimates nothing, that it is precisely there where you are not - this is the beginning of writing.", we will seek to understand how Ana C. fights against a certain absence ("it is precisely there where you are not") that would be inherent to language. We can see emerge the issues we intend to study in her poetry when she writes, under the light of Walt Whitman: "Love, this is not a book, it's me, it's me you hold, and who holds you; (...) I spring from the pages into your arms, your fingers drowse me (...)". Artifices as an intense demand of the reader to the poem, at the same time in which the gap between them is declared; an intimate appeal that is forged through the use of epistolary and daily entries; and, often, a direct conflict with the language, that is present in verses which refer to the exercise of writing - all this suggests the way Ana C. articulates her concerns and how she wants to be read. Annita Costa Malufe (2011) seems to understand these issues when she writes: "We may be facing a text that is body, but not a body of flesh and bone. We could thus extend our body idea, and imagine a language that is itself body: a body that affect other bodies; tactile language, sonorous, plastic (...)."Key-words: Ana Cristina Cesar; Literary criticism; Brazilian contemporary poetry. (AU)