Lima Barreto: o escritor do nomadismo

Abstract

The object of this doctoral thesis is to study the short stories of the writer born in Rio de Janeiro, Afonso Henriques de Lima Barreto, through a literary analysis from a new theoretical perspective, the nomadism. However, since the second half of the 20th century, Lima Barreto's writing has been treated according to more sociological than literary criteria, that is, the researches on his works have focused on thematic aspects, especially those of contemporaneity, such as racial, social, cultural and representational issues. In this sense, the main objective of this thesis is to identify, by means of the short story textual genre, that it is not possible to understand Lima Barreto's production as engaged with specific themes, but as a writing in permanent transit, situated in between places, or characterized by a nomadic writing. Regarding the problematic of nomadism, we used the conceptual precepts of Flusser (2003, 2007); regarding the critical and theoretical fortune on the works of Lima Barreto, we used, as main discursive propositions, Barbosa (2002), Schwarcz (2017), Oakley (2011), and Figueiredo (2017); As for the specificity of the textual genre, this work has Pratt (1994), O’Connor (2004) and Cortázar (2006) as theoretical support; Regarding the narrative, the theoretical support uses Candido (2000; 2004) about the function of literature and Adorno (2012) about the artist as representative. The research is qualitative in nature since it dwells on the analysis of aesthetic categories - such as the types of discourses and language employed - and cultural categories, such as the experience of subjectivity and the writer's function, which permeate the selected texts. The short stories used were published between 1915 and 1922, the time of Lima Barreto's greatest production and participation in magazines, newspapers, and books. The short stories were produced in the political, social, and cultural context of the belle époque carioca and present leitmotif themes in which it is possible to compare them in order to show to what extent there is engagement with art - which would be proper of the nomadic gesture - or with social demands. The hypothesis of this thesis is that Lima Barreto's writing is in movement, that is, it breaks with the usual as a form of criticism, while it tries to be part of that which is the object of its criticism. This paradoxical movement is explained by Flusser's (2003, 2007) nomadism, which starts from the premise that there are no eternal values in humanity, but mutable functions. And this is what Barreto does throughout his production, either to get into the Brazilian Academy of Letters or to live off the glory of letters, as the writer used to say. However, Lima Barreto does it consciously and guided by his idealization of the writer's and the literature's function, in which he believed that only through art it was possible to overcome the limitations imposed by the several prejudices.