Daily poetics, literary novelty, and gender in Eles e Elas by Júlia Lopes de Almeida

• Grant number: 23/04123-1
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Post-Doctoral
• Start date: April 01, 2024
• Status: Discontinued
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Literature - Brazilian Literature
• Principal Investigator: Lucia Granja
• Grantee: Ana Carolina Sá Teles
• Host Institution: Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem (IEL). Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Campinas , SP, Brazil
• Associated scholarship(s): 24/12788-6 - The "Woman Question" in the British literature and press and its debate by Júlia Lopes de Almeida's works at the turn of the century, BE.EP.PD

Abstract

The Project investigates the literary novelty in the work Eles e Elas (1910), by Júlia Lopes de Almeida. The book was disqualified from the ABL literary works contest in 1911 for being composed of chronicles, which were first published in the newspaper. As a writer-journalist, Júlia Lopes de Almeida came out in defence of her own collection, arguing in her column in O Paiz that the work presented a new genre of prose fiction in Brazilian literature. This genre could be defined as "psychology essays", or even "literary essays", according to Almeida. The episode of the declassification of Eles e Elas reveals the strong association between literary forms and journalistic forms at the turn of the century, as well as the resistance to the consecration of women writers. To debate the relationship between literature and journalism, especially regarding the production of female writers from the Belle Époque, we refer to fundamental studies by Marie-Ève Thérenty, Christine Planté, Dominique Kalifa, Philippe Régnier, Alain Vaillant, Lucia Granja, Tania Regina de Luca, and Ana Cláudia Suriani da Silva. Recent research by Marie-Ève Thérenty demonstrates not only how were journalism and literature intertwined poetics in the French nineteenth century, but also how the restrictions imposed on the female gender enhanced the correspondence between the two modes of writing. In addition to mobilizing the relationship between literature and journalism at the cusp between the 19th and the 20th centuries, the research refers to the relationship between literature and related areas such as psychoanalysis, philosophy, and sociology, in terms of gender theories, and the history of women and family. The Project joins FAPESP's APR-2020/03648-5 by proposing the renewal of research problems and of methods that expand the understanding of the literary field at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century in Brazil. In this way, the mechanisms of recognition and exclusion of writers are clarified, according to Bourdieau's thesis on the multiple agents in dispute for spaces and on the different degrees of autonomization in the literary field. The research results contribute to building a narrative that rescues an emblematic female voice in the history of Brazilian literature. They also reveal the modern aspect of Júlia Lopes de Almeida's work, consistent with the international scenario, where female journalist-writers innovated by writing fiction and topicality in the interstices between the newspapers and literature. (AU)