Children of the Night: Nocturnal Poetics in Brazilian Poetry (Nineteenth-Twentieth Centuries)

• Grant number: 23/03685-6
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Doctorate
• Start date: June 01, 2024
• End date: August 29, 2028
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Literature - Brazilian Literature
• Principal Investigator: Antônio Donizeti Pires
• Grantee: Rangel Gomes de Andrade
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Ciências e Letras (FCL). Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP). Campus de Araraquara. Araraquara , SP, Brazil

Abstract

This project aims to explore the presence of the night in three Brazilian poets: Lúcio Cardoso, Roberto Piva, and Hilda Hilst. Through the works Poesias (1941), Novas poesias (1944), Paranoia (1963), and Da noite (1992), we aim to investigate how a certain nocturnal poetics, with a romantic hue, emerges in Brazilian poetry from the mid-20th century, and how Cardoso, Piva, and Hilst, each in their own way, reconfigure the theme of the night, giving it a focus in accordance with their particular poetics. In general, we can say that in the works studied from each of the poets, a nocturnal worldview prevails, in which the night functions as a catalyst for poetry. We assume three intersecting presuppositions to think about the connections between the romantic poetics of the night and the reviewed poets: the notion of a romantic vision of the world, as defended by Löwy and Sayre (2015), as a transhistorical way of conceiving Romanticism, based on the poet's conflicting and contradictory relationship with the modern world; the idea proposed by Octavio Paz (2013) of a "poetry of convergence," opposed to the tradition of rupture, which assumes a discontinuous relationship between poetry and historical present, and a less disruptive posture of the poet towards tradition; the Benjaminian concept of "fate" (BENJAMIN, 2013), according to which historical time is seen not as inexorable teleology, but as the survival of aesthetic and cultural phenomena. Based on this, we hypothesize that a nocturnal vein persists in modern-contemporary Brazilian poetry, which revisits and recontextualizes the romantic vision of the night and its associated elements, particularly eroticism and death, as expressions of the dark and negative aspects of human experience, in contrast to the ordinary and mundane universe of the day, represented by a certain solar and rational poetic practice. We consider that the negativity that surrounds the nocturnal sensibility is intimately associated with the theory of the sublime, particularly of Burkean extraction (BURKE, 1993), considered the quintessential negative aesthetic category, in which elements of the morbid, the abject, and the terrifying are presupposed. Therefore, the poetics of Cardoso, Piva, and Hilst are understood here as ways of accessing the sublime, through the nocturnal experience, in which the instances of the erotic and the fatal come together.