Uma miríade de sensações: Francisco Dantas e a construção do espaço literário (1991-1997)

Abstract

From the first three literary works written by Francisco José Costa Dantas, respectively Coivara da Memória (1991), Os Desvalidos (1993) and Cartilha do Silêncio (1997), this work analyzes the construction of a literary space that represents the Brazilian state of Sergipe between the years 1900 to 1950. Dantas' narratives recreate this Sergipe of the past through his sentences and imagination, the latter driven by experiences and recordings. For that, I examined what are the aspects that I look for in this place of the past for creativity, experiences, and words. In view of this dissemination, I will investigate how Francisco Dantas, objective in his identity, as an author and intellectual, as well as his national and local dissemination. I will make use of Derrida's concepts of “proper name” and self-writing, in comparison with other authors. Next, I will look for how much Francisco Dantas articulates his and family members experiences in the production of his literature, recreating spaces of his youth. To this end, I mobilized Yi-Fu Tuan, Robert Tally, Peter Turchi and Aleida Assmann. As well, I will problematize the experience of the characters lived in Sergipe society recreated by the author, and comparing these men and women made by those who lived with Francisco Dantas. In this way, I also seek to understand how the author mobilizes regionalism in his literature, to build this northeastern spatial clipping, full of nostalgia and traditional regionalist topics. In this way, I will mainly make use of the problematization of the concept of Northeast and Northeastern proposed by Durval Muniz de Albuquerque Júnior. From the analysis of such elements, it is possible to study how Francisco Dantas forged his literary Sergipe while a creative representation of space will be a lived experience.