Sociologia e literatura: utopia em José Saramago

Abstract

The dissertation has as its theme the literature of José Saramago and its interface with classical and contemporary concepts of sociology. Taking as main corpus the book A Caverna, the objective is to analyze the relationship between the literature of José Saramago and contemporary society and, in general, the relation between sociology and literature as complementary narratives about the social universe. The central question that is posed is the possibility of articulate, through Saramago's work, sociology and literature as forms of expression of the same dilemmas that mark the human experience of being-in-the-world. Initially, I develop comments about the relationship between sociology and literature and present elements that allow us to point out the proximity of Saramago's work to sociology. Henceforth, I elaborate the idea of modernity as a utopian expression, both in literature and in sociology, and of the Centro thematized in A Caverna as a modality of degenerate utopia of the consumer society. I return to the book to find in the novel elements that allow to escape from an ethics of resignation and to formulate its utopian potential, having as a starting point the remodeling of the notion of utopia as an interdiction of the present, elaborated by Ernst Bloch. From the methodological point of view, this is a bibliographical research, through which I tried to identify, in Saramago's work, passages that subsidize the hypothesis that its literature, in particular the work A Caverna, can be taken as a form of signification and reading of reality that is close to that realized by sociology. From the point of view of theoretical problematization, the text can be read as a long dialogue between José Saramago and Zygmunt Bauman; the latter as the main interlocutor, with eventual help from other authors, all located in the space of communication between social interpretation and literary construction, such as Wolf Lepenies, Franz Kafka, Beatriz Sarlo, Albert Camus, Ernst Bloch, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Peter Sloterdijk and Emil Cioran.