Orality writings: Homero and Francisco Sales Arêda as exponents of ancient and contemporary oral literature

• Grant number: 23/01458-2
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: August 01, 2023
• End date: July 31, 2024
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Literature - Classical Literatures
• Principal Investigator: Adriane da Silva Duarte
• Grantee: Júlia Moura Dias
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil

Abstract

The project aims to explain common aspects between northeastern brazilian cordel literature and Greek epic, as products of popular culture in antiquity and in recent times, in order to better understand the process of creation and dissemination of oral literature through the analysis of the works " O Negrão do Paraná e o Seringueiro do Norte", "The meeting of the brother of Negrão do Paraná with the Seringueiro do Norte" and "Coronel Mangangá e o Seringueiro do Norte" by the cordelist Francisco Sales de Arêda and songs XX and XXI from Homer's "Iliad", representative of the genres they form part of and thematically similar to one another.According to Jadir de Morais Pessoa, popular culture, in addition to being an expression of the daily life and work of a community, is also a "construction of knowledge that is lived in gestures of sharing between equals before being exchanged and communicated" (PESSOA, 2018 ), as well as, from the perspective of Greek tradition, Reece suggests that the traditionality of the Homeric epic in all its complexity and particularity comes from the sharing and transmission of narratives:"(...) no single poet could have been responsible for such systems; they had been created and nurtured by generations of bards who had passed them down from father to son, from master to student, until they reached Homer in the late eighth century BCE." (REECE, 2015)Therefore, the research to be carried out seeks to identify the reflections of these social interactions in the texts of Arêda and Homero.Starting from the proposed theoretical texts, it is possible to delimit the spaces for the dissemination of ancient oral poetry and cordel literature, their social function and particularizing characteristics, as well as the associations of identification and belonging between text and society, responsible for the intimacy between work and culture that will be worked on in the research, since the aspects of the literature analyzed, both thematic and aesthetic, are only consolidated based on the characteristics of the societies where they thrive.Thus, traces of orality will be observed in the language used in the poems, textual evidence of the public dissemination of narratives through the work of a singer - be it the northeastern singer or the Greek aedo - the presence of the collective imagination in the characters and narratives composed and the function or importance of the literary genres of which they are part for the society in which they are inserted.In conclusion, I propose a comparative study between the cordel literature of Francisco Sales de Arêda and the Homeric chants of the Iliad, raising the hypothesis that popular verse production in northeastern Brazil is a means of understanding the oral transmission of poetry in Hellenic society by through its similarities to the Greek epic of antiquity, regarding its common origin in the form of circulation of the works via oral tradition, in mostly illiterate societies and through the work of a singer, suggesting the comparison as a way of identifying the permanence of the genres oral texts throughout history and a didactic way of understanding the classical tradition from a contemporary literature.