"It's for you that I write, hypocrite": Ana Cristina Cesar and the lyric address

• Grant number: 24/05894-4
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Post-Doctoral
• Start date: April 01, 2025
• End date: March 31, 2028
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Literature - Literature Theory
• Principal Investigator: Marcos Antonio Siscar
• Grantee: Rita de Cássia Bovo de Loiola
• Host Institution: Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem (IEL). Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Campinas , SP, Brazil

Abstract

This research proposes an investigation of the lyric address in the poems of Ana Cristina Cesar (1952-1983), examining how the reading of Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) contributed to the development of the relationship with the poetic interlocutor. Through the analysis of poems, with the support of critical texts, and the correspondence, this work aims to verify how the writer approached this issue in her work, and what are the consequences of this emphasis for her reading of the poetic tradition. In this sense, we will address the repeated references to Baudelaire, author of the famous invitation to the "hypocrite lecteur - mon semblable - mon frère" in the opening of his Fleurs du Mal. Through complex interactions of confrontation, contrast, assimilation and reinvention, Baudelaire will be called to Cesar's text as a provocative instance, productive for creation of her thoughts concerning the poetic addressee. The connection with the reader of poetry through the inscription of lyric address has become crucial for understanding poetic modernity as well as the study of Ana Cristina Cesar, involving the mobilization the interlocutor - or the "other" - with her rhetoric of correspondence, diary or her "art of conversation". Therefore, this work intends to highlight the representation of the ties with alterity, investigating strategies created in the author's poems and verifying how the reinvention of Baudelaire's poetics contributes to the formulation of a poetics that is also a way of reading modernity.