Guimarães Rosa and Graciliano Ramos: a firefly between heaven and hell

• Grant number: 17/06949-3
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: August 01, 2017
• End date: July 31, 2018
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Literature - Brazilian Literature
• Principal Investigator: Sandra Guardini Teixeira Vasconcelos
• Grantee: Renata Del Moro
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil

Abstract

This research is a comparative analysis between two short stories from Guimarães Rosa ("As margens da alegria" and "A menina de lá"), and four passages from Graciliano Ramos' Infância ("Verão", "O fim do mundo", "Inferno" and "Os astrônomos"). We intend to verify a possible relationship between the works of the mentioned authors, by the singularity of the puerile view. We aim to analyze how each author deals with violence and frustration, as well as with happiness and hope. The study is based on Alfredo Bosi's article "Céu, inferno", which states that Guimarães Rosa's literature would represent a rise to heaven whereas Graciliano Ramos' would represent a fall to hell. We attempt to show that, by analyzing the infant characters represented by each author in these texts, the simple opposition heaven-hell is not enough to cover the complexity of the works. In order to problematize this aspect, we proposed the image of the firefly (present in the short story "As margens da alegria") as a pertinent metaphor to both authors and their writings. (AU)