Imagens da morte: um estudo do gênero policial-fantástico em Poe, Wilde e Christie

The mirror has always been related to different symbols, usually connected to self-knowledge and truth. This is due to the fact that this object shows whoever looks oneself in it an image as close to reality as it is possible. On the other hand, the mirror is also associated to mysticism and to the supernatural for it can magically duplicate one who looks into it. This ambiguous characteristic turns the mirror into an element that is fantastic in itself and places it in the central position of our discussion. Therefore, in this study, we analyze the texts In a Glass Darkly, by Agatha Christie, The Oval Portrait, by Edgar Allan Poe, and The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde, giving special attention to the study of the images and artificial representations of men: the mirror, as an ephemeral representation; and the portrait, as an attempt to eternize an ephemeral image. We also discuss themes such as jealousy, the double, and death in the several forms in which it appears in the texts: suicides, homicides, attempted murders, death in life (mourning, separation, and developmental phases) all of which are, somehow, related to the specular representations. The narrative resource of using a mirror to introduce the supernatural event, along with the theme of death in all the narratives we have studied, and the difficulty to place these texts within the pre-established genres led us to categorize them as being part of a hybrid genre that presents characteristics both of the fantastic and of the detective story which we have named fantastic-detective story

Liberdade e negação da vontade: análise do ser-livre como representação e na angústia

Common understanding about what freedom means has always been more or less related to the power to realize something intended, desired, a capability. Therefore, being free is commonly interpreted under the concept of free-will and the category of possibility to act. Although there are predecessors in History of Philosophy, Schopenhauer refuses the thesis of free will proposing otherwise the denial of willing (to live) as the ultimate possibility for human freedom, if not the only one left. The thesis that would make him famous was deeply misunderstood and so miscarried somewhat due to the way it was many times presented by the means of exotic examples wrapped in a mystical mood besides exaltations to Eastern traditions, which may satisfy anthropological curiosity instead of being capable to satisfy the reader in a philosophical way. It seems to result from Schopenhauer s thought a kind of pessimism against life. Otherwise, typical readings on the Schopenhauerian thesis are found full of inconsistencies once closely regarded, which blame does not belong to the author but to his interpreters. A new reading about the denial of willing as the ultimate possibility for human freedom demands a criticism on the inconsistencies and prejudgments deep grounded. For this, we firstly clarify the ways of understanding the willing nothing , which cannot be reduced to the mere refusal or conformism, being instead positively understood as a special manner of willing: the admission of oneself for the sake of one is. A few more than a century later The world as will and representation came to light, Heidegger proposes in his fundamental ontology that the proper being-free concerns to originary decision by which, in anguish of being suspended in nothingness, Dasein renders itself singular as the being who is in-a-world and to-death, concluding that the ultimate possibility of freedom is being-free-to-death. Developing the hypothesis that freedom, properly understood, concerns to nothingness as to indeterminate possibilities, we seek for a dialogue between Schopenhauer s thought and existential philosophy aiming to reconstitute and overcome Metaphysics tradition turning the question about freedom into a matter of Ontology. From the factual existence perspective, as we must show, every human activity (or inactivity) is ordinarily mediated by representations, in which me and world appear as distinct entities. So, each one among determininate individuals finds itself connected to the things in the world by interest, which proper concept must be sufficiently explored. Starting from this point, we may proceed to detailed analysis of usual representations of freedom aiming their destruction by Ontology and then reaching existential thesis according to Kierkegaard and Heidegger. Turning back to the analysis of Schopenhauer s work, we conclude existential understanding of freedom as will-to-be can also be found in Schopenhauer. In this way, denial of willing means ultimate freedom once the Will turns back to its own essence by suppressing the world as representation, which means the originary absolute indetermination of the extreme possibility to-be

Palavras da maldição: O Ceará de José Alcides Pinto entre símbolos e alegorias.

This work treats about the speeches that produced the crisis of symbols of Ceará, researching on matters and ways of expression of space between 1950s and 1970s. Therefore, we search discursive practices that since the end of nineteenth century built the identity of Ceará and in the middle of twentieth century produced the crisis of modes of seeing and telling the space in front of enunciations of the national modernization, especially with the emergence of politics by SUDENE to the Northeast, the progressive actions by Catholic Church, the defense of tradition by regional literature of union of Ceará Clã. The contradictions between the glorification and fear the modernization of Brazil produced on the space speeches that his identity would be fractured, that the old symbols of drought, cangaço, mysticism and colonels declined. Among analyzed speeches, we centered the analysis of Trilogia da Maldição formed of novels O Dragão, of 1964, Os Verdes Abutres da Colina and João Pinto de Maria: a biografia de um louco by José Alcides Pinto. In this novel, the enunciation of the crisis of symbologies about the space produced another aesthetic, the allegory, which, mixed with the mystical and melancholy, in search of ways to restore the language of the old themes Ceará, drop of Ceará the same stigma of anti-modern space, where the images of delay changed icons of a fractured identity in front of the modern streams, where the word was transformed in the dimension precarious and redeemer of the tradition, of old, of nature, of the plenitude of senses. In Jose Alcides, the colonel returns as the origin of the lost space, the drought is the revolt of God against the devil place, the apocalypse, the end imminent threat to the village, signs that fantastic, however, are in dialogue with the settings space and time in which they were produced