O herói problemático no romance de formação tardio: um estudo dos protagonistas de "Grande Sertão: Veredas" e "Um retrato do artista quando jovem"

Abstract

The present research aims to establish a comparative study of the heroes of the novels Grande sertão: veredas, by João Guimarães Rosa, and A portrait of the artist as a young man, by James Joyce. In theoretical terms, we appropriate Lukacs's Theory of the novel, whose considerations about the loss of the extensive totality of life, as well as the essentially problematic condition of the hero are fundamental for the proposed analysis. To complement Lukacs' theoretical foundation, we turn to Reflections on the modern novel, by Anatol Rosenfeld, as his series of hypotheses provides us with a narrowing of the possibilities of dialogue. Based on that, our thesis articulates the communication between the works restricting itself to the observation of the heroes under three aspects. First, we take the novels from the perspective of the Bildungsroman tradition through the typology Erziehungsroman designated by Lukacs (2007) in dialogue with the concept of late Bildungsroman by Moretti (2020). In a second moment, we observe how the authors resort to mythical models for the construction of their heroes. For this, we start from the hypothesis, suggested by Rosenfeld (1996), about the return of the modern novel to the archetypal models. To address the relationship between myth and literature, we visited the considerations of authors such as Barthes (2001) and Mielietinski (1987); for the analysis of our objects of study, we resorted to Northrop Frye's theory of modes (2014). Finally, we investigate how narrative procedures and temporal subjectivity are linked to the psychological profile of these characters. For this, in addition to the mentioned essay by Rosenfeld (1996), we resorted to texts by Auerbach (2015) and Adorno (2003). Through this study, we concluded that, through the three indicated categories, the cultural-thematic barrier is overcome, proving the breadth of the thematic horizon and the problematic condition of these protagonists. On the other hand, it was found that the links of stylistic values between the authors, commonly promoted by linguistic criteria, can be established through other categories, such as the character study proposed here.