Trauma, Discourse and Enunciative Heterogeneity: a route through the testimonies of children of the brazilian Civil-Military Dictatorship

• Grant number: 22/08475-7
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date until: November 01, 2022
• End date until: October 31, 2023
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Linguistics
• Principal Investigator: Lauro José Siqueira Baldini
• Grantee: Amani Musstafa Zoghbi
• Host Institution: Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem (IEL). Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Campinas , SP, Brazil

Abstract

The present research, affiliated to the Materialist Discourse Analysis, aims, mobilizing the testimonial literature and the notions of enunciative heterogeneity, to investigate the possibility of a particular functioning of enunciative heterogeneity in the testimonial discourse. The research essentially questions who narrates when a witness proposes to narrate a traumatic story; whether, in this case, there would be a clash between the injured child, in whom the trauma was inscribed, the adult, who appears at the tables of a commission, or the collective sons of the dictatorship, who speaks for one or multiple causes, among so many other possible clashes. The investigation, which shifts its gaze to linguistic materiality, to what emerges through misunderstanding, non-sense, and failure, revolves around eighteen testimonies from the Verdade e Infância Roubada Seminary, intended to hear testimonies of children of political activists affected by repression. It will be up to the candidate to transcribe them, following the transcription conventions of Petri (1993, 2009). The corpus analysis process will be carried out through a reading-crushing gesture (Pêcheux, 1981), producing extractions, clippings and approximations of discursive sequences, utterances and linguistic marks that bring the analyst closer to what he suspects to be structuring. The delimitation of the corpus does not aim at a horizontal exhaustiveness (in extension), but a vertical exhaustion, which produces relevant theoretical consequences. This search for structuring elements, which are repeated in the materials, questions the possible conditions of manifestation of different voices in the discursive thread, and supports the suspicion that these materialities would also be present in other cases in which the testimony is in question.