Models of complexity in Robert Coover's John's wife and the adventures of Lucky Pierre

This doctoral dissertation analyzes two novels by the American novelist Robert Coover as examples of hypertextual writing on the book bound page, as tokens of hyperfiction. The complexity displayed in the novels, John's Wife and The Adventures of Lucky Pierre, integrates the cultural elements that characterize the contemporary condition of capitalism and technologized practices that have fostered a different subjectivity evidenced in hypertextual writing and reading, the posthuman subjectivity. The models that account for the complexity of each novel are drawn from the concept of strange attractors in Chaos Theory and from the concept of rhizome in Nomadology. The transformations the characters undergo in the degree of their corporeality sets the plane on which to discuss turbulence and posthumanity. The notions of dynamic patterns and strange attractors, along with the concept of the Body without Organs and Rhizome are interpreted, leading to the revision of narratology and to analytical categories appropriate to the study of the novels. The reading exercised throughout this dissertation enacts Daniel Punday's corporeal reading. The changes in the characters' degree of materiality are associated with the stages of order, turbulence and chaos in the story, bearing on the constitution of subjectivity within and along the reading process. Coover's inscription of planes of consistency to counter linearity and accommodate hypertextual features to the paper supported narratives describes the characters' trajectory as rhizomatic. The study led to the conclusion that narrative today stands more as a regime in a rhizomatic relation with other regimes in cultural practice than as an exclusively literary form and genre. Besides this, posthuman subjectivity emerges as class identity, holding hypertextual novels as their literary form of choice.

Um virtuose do além-mar em terras de Santa Cruz : a obra pianística de Arthur Napoleão (1843-19250

Esta tese trata do significado musical do ponto de vista hermenêutico na obra para piano do pianista-compositor luso-brasileiro Arthur Napoleão (1845-1925). O exame técnicoestético de sua obra pianística adota uma perspectiva relacional entre texto musical e entorno cultural, situando compositor e obra dentro do campo de problematização das várias estéticas que configuraram o Romantismo do século XIX. A elaboração do modelo analítico e as análises empreendidas do corpus musical selecionado compreenderam uma leitura de tipo hermenêutico em que se cruzaram informações contextuais atinentes aos pólos de criação e recepção das obras. Desta forma trataram-se os principais gêneros musicais empregados pelo compositor à luz da recepção de sua carreira de virtuose tanto no Brasil quanto no exterior. O corpus documental é constituído por materiais diversos pesquisados em bibliotecas nacionais e estrangeiras