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| Author(s): |
Anita Martins Rodrigues de Moraes
Total Authors: 1
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| Document type: | Doctoral Thesis |
| Press: | Campinas, SP. |
| Institution: | Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem |
| Defense date: | 2007-05-17 |
| Examining board members: |
Suzi Frankl Sperber;
Miriam Gárate;
Márcio Seligmann Silva;
Luiz França Costa Lima Filho;
Rita de Cassia Natal Chaves
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| Advisor: | Suzi Frankl Sperber |
| Abstract | |
This dissertation is dedicated to the study of some theoretical presuppositions underlying the critical readings of the so-called African Literature of Portuguese Language. In the first part of the dissertation, "Tracing the Path: in Terra Sonâmbula", in which we analyze the book Terra Sonâmbula (Sleepwalking Land), by Mia Couto, two main interpretative strategies are revealed: 1) the one that searches for traces of orality in the text, and suggests that the intertext with orality determines its Romanesque structure ¿ to which the short stories and proverbs are decisive; 2) the one that analyses the novel¿s compositional structures in search of the challenges that a radical event of violence, for example the civil war in Mozambique, imposes to the narrative. The theoretical retreat, which is undertaken in the second part, "Undoing the Path: Theoretical Retreat", investigates some of the suppositions of these two strategies of analysis and interpretation. In the chapter "The Fair Word", first chapter of the second part, we focus on the analytical instruments developed by the studies of testimonial discourses (especially Jeanne-Marie Gagnebin and Shoshana Felman) and the post-colonial discourses (especially Edward Said, Arlindo Barbeitos and Mudimbe). Our focus is on the imbrication between discursive strategies and ethical-political positionings, which form the theoretical core of the two fields approached. In the second chapter of the second part, titled ¿The Guilty Writing¿, we present the study of the dichotomy between writing and orality, remounting to Jean-Jacques Rousseau and perpassing some acclaimed theoreticians of the study of orality traces in African Literature: Vladímir Propp, Walter Benjamin and Paul Zumthor. Our interest is to make explicit certain associations (like freedom, joy and orality versus impediment, solitude and writing) and presuppositions (like the historical linearity and the economical conditioning and/or midia) many times implicated in the repositioning of this dichotomy in the field of African Literature Studies, as well as suggest some convergencies and divergencies in the formulations of these thinkers. The final part of the work (Furtive Writing: Some Final Considerations) is dedicated to conclusive considerations, which relate the previous parts and include a new approach to the novel. Somehow, the structure of the dissertation reflects our investigative path, which went from the Couto's novel to the theoretical investigation of its critical fortune (AU) | |