Narratives of Travel and the Travelling Concept of Narrative: Genre Blending and the Art of Transformation

In this article I shall argue that understandings of what constitutes narrative, how it functions, and the contexts in which it applies have broadened in line with cultural, social and intellectual trends which have seen a blurring, if not the dissolution, of boundaries between ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’; ‘literary’ and ‘non-literary’ narrative spaces; history and story; concepts of time and space, text and image, teller and tale, representation and reality.To illustrate some of the ways in which the concept of narrative has travelled across disciplinary and generic boundaries, I shall look at The Art of Travel (de Botton 2003), with a view to demonstrating how the blending of genres works to produce a narrative that is at once personal and philosophical; visual and verbal; didactic and poetic. I shall show that such a text constitutes a site of interrogation of concepts of narrative, even as it depends on the reader’s ability to narrativize experience.

Second person : a point of view? The function of the second person pronoun in narrative prose fiction

This thesis looks at the functions and effects of the ‘second-person’ pronoun in narrative prose fiction, with particular focus on the fluidity and ambiguity of the mode that I will call Protean-'you.' It is a mode in which it is unclear whether the ‘you’ is a character, the narrator, a reader/narratee, or no-one in particular—or a combination of these—so that readers find ‘second-person’ utterances at once familiar and deeply strange. I regard the ‘second person’ as a special case of narrative ‘person’ that, at its most fluid, can produce an experience of reading quite unlike that of reading traditional ‘first-‘ and ‘third-person’ narrative. Essentially, this unique experience comes about because Protean-‘you’ neglects to constitute the stable modes of subjectivity that readers expect to find within narrative textuality. These stable modes of subjectivity, modelled on what I will refer to as Cartesianism’s hegemonic notion of the self, have been thoroughly formalised and naturalised within the practices of ‘first-‘ and ‘third-person’ narrative. The Protean-‘you’ form of ‘second-person’ narrative, conversely, is a mode of narrative discourse that puts readers in a place of doubt and uncertainty, its unsettling equivocations forcefully disrupting accustomed, mimetic explanations of narrative and denying us access to the foundational, authorising subject of classical Cartesian thought. Rather than founding a notion of ‘second-person’ narrative and narrative ‘person’ generally on Cartesianism's ‘self-ish’ logic of unified, privatised identity, I turn to C.S, Peirce's notion of the semiotic self and to developments in post-structuralist thought. Essentially, the conception of subjectivity underpinning my arguments is Peirce's proposition that the self is to be conceived of not as a cogito, but as a sign by which the conscious entity knows itself. It is a sign, moreover, that is constantly being re-read, reinterpreted, so that identity is never self-complete. This reconception of subjectivity is necessary because 1 will argue that the effects of Protean-‘you’ arise in some part from a tension between Cartesianism's hegemony and what philosophical pragmatism and post-structuralism glimpse as the actual condition of the human subject—the subject as dispersed and contingent rather than unified and authoritative. Most discussions of ‘second-person’ narrative conceive of the mode in terms of implicit communicative relations, in some measure instituting Cartesianism's notion of the intentionalist self at the centre of literary meaning. I contrast the paradigmatic address model that arises from this conception against a model that approaches the analysis of ‘second-person’ narrative modality in terms of a referential function, that is, in terms of the object or objects referred to deictically by the ‘second-person’ pronoun. Two principal functions of ‘second-person’ textuality are identified and discussed at length. The first is generalisation, which is rarely dissipated altogether, a situation that contributes to the ambiguities of the pronoun's reference in much ‘second-person’ fiction. The second principal function is that of address, that is, the allocutionary function. Clearly, although stories that continually refer to a ‘you’ can seem quite baffling and unnatural, not all ‘second-person’ narratives unsettle the reader. In order to make the ‘second person's’ outlandish narratives knowable and stable, we bring to bear on them in our habits of reading whatever hermeneutic frames, whatever interpretive keys, come to hand, including a large number of unexceptional forms of literary and ‘natural’ discourse that employ the ‘second-person’ pronoun. These forms include letter writing and internal dialogue (i.e., talking to one's self), the language of the courtroom, the travelogue, the maxim, and so on. In looking at the ways in which the radicalising potentials of ‘second-person’ discourse are contained or recuperated, I focus on issues of vraisemblance and mimesis. Vraisemblance can be described as the ‘system of conventions and expectations which rests on/reinforces that more general system of ‘mutual knowledge’ produced within a community for the realisation and maintenance of a whole social world’. All of the forms of the vraisemblable are already instituted within social, cultural relations, so that what vraisemblance describes is the way we fit the inscriptions we read-that is, the way in which we naturalise what we read-into those given cultural and social forms. I also look at the conventionalising and naturalising work done by notions of mimesis in explaining relations between the world, our being in it, and texts, proposing that mimesis provides a principle buttress by which the good standing of the metaphor of ‘person’ is preserved in traditional and pre-critical modes of analysis. Indeed, the critic’s recourse to ‘person’ is in some measure always an engagement with mimesis. Any discussion that maintains that mimesis is in some way productive of meaning-which this thesis in fact does-must identify mimesis as a merely conventional category within practices of reading and semiosis more generally, and at the very least remove that term from its traditional position of transparent primacy and authority. Some of the most interesting and insightful arguments about ‘second-person’ narrative propose that the ‘second person’s’ most striking effects derive from the constitution of an ‘intersubjective’ experience of reading in which the subject positions of the ‘you’-protagonist, reader-narratee and narrator are combined into a fluid and indeterminate multiple subjectivity. Notions of intersubjectivity frequently position themselves as liberating the reader from Cartesianism's fixed, authoritative modes of subjectivity, Frequently, however, they tend implicitly to reinstate Cartesianism's notion of the self at the centre of textual practice and subjectivity. I look at Daniel Gunn's novel ‘Almost You’, at length in this context, illustrating the constant overdetermination of the ‘you’ and the novel's narrating voice, and demonstrating that this overdetermination leaves the origin of the narrative discourse, the identity of the narrator, and the ontological nature of both principal protagonists utterly ambiguous. The fluidity and ambiguity of Protean-‘you’ in ‘Almost You’ is discussed in terms of ‘second-person’ intersubjectivity, but with a view to demonstrating the indebtedness by the notion of intersubjectivity to Cartesianism's hegemony of ‘person’. I then turn to a discussion of what might be a more ‘old fashioned’ if perhaps ultimately more far-reaching approach to the ‘second person’s’ often startling ambiguities. This is Keats's notion of negative capability, a capacity or quality in which a person ‘is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.’ I suggest that Protean-‘you’ texts will license all of the readings of ambiguity and fluidity proposed in my discussion of ‘Almost You’, but conclude that the instances of indeterminacy illustrate no more than that: the fluidity and deep ambiguity, and thus, finally, the lack of coherence, of Protean-‘you’ discourse. This has particular implications for how we are to consider readers’ experiences of narrative texts. More fundamentally, it has implications for how we are to consider readers as subjects. I suggest that unstable, ambiguous instances of ‘second-person’ narrative can tear the complex and systematic embroidery of ideological suture that unifies Cretinism’s experience or sense of subjectivity, leaving the reader in a condition of epistemological and ontological havoc. I go on to argue that much of the deeply unsettling effect of Protean-‘you’ discourse anises because its utterances explicitly gesture towards Cretinism’s notion of self. Protean-‘you’ involves a sense of address that is much more pronounced than we are accustomed to facing when reading literary narrative, alerting us to the presence of inscribed anthropomorphic subjects. At the very same time, protean-‘you’ leaves its inscribed subjects indeterminate, ambiguous. This conflict generates a tension between the anticipation of the emergence of speaking and listening selves and our inability to find them. I go on to propose that Protean-‘you’ narrative's lack of coherence is also to be understood as the condition of narrative actuality generally, but a condition that is vigorously mediated against by dominant practices of reading and writing, hocusing my discussion in this respect on the issue of narrative ‘person,’ I argue that narrative ‘person’ is constituted within texts as an apparent unity, but that it is in fact, produced as unitary solely within the practice of making sense, that is, Within our habits of reading, and so is never finally unified. I propose that this is the case for ‘first-‘ and ‘third-person’ modes no less than for the ‘second.’ Where ‘second-person’ narrative at its most radical and Protean differs from conventional ‘first-‘ and ‘third-person’ narratives is the degree to which each has been circumscribed by practices of tantalization, containment and limit, and, in particular, Cretinism’s hegemony of ‘person.’ It may be that the most significant insights ‘second-person’ narrative has to offer are to be found within its capacity to reveal to the engaged reader the underlying condition of narrative discourse, and more generally, its capacity to reveal the actual condition of the human subject-a condition in which, exactly like its textual corollary of narrative ‘person,’ the self is glimpsed as thoroughly dispersed and contingent.

Una introducción al Libro de Josué

Resumen: El artículo introduce al lector a los principales temas necesarios para una comprensión general del libro de Josué. Busca ofrecer herramientas de análisis literarias que permitan ejercitar una hermenéutica propia. Se presentan los distintos aspectos del libro de Josué, su estructura literaria y se evalúa su condición de obra histórica, su eventual vínculo con la Obra Histórica Deuteronomística, y la presencia en sus relatos del discurso teológico que le otorga una visión particular de la historia de Israel.

Subjetividade em situação: a narrativa literária como possibilidade de compreensão da existência em Jean-Paul Sartre

A articulação entre as obras filosóficas e literárias de Jean-Paul Sartre nos permite acompanhar o processo de elaboração da compreensão de subjetividade do autor. A partir do método comparativo e do método progressivo-regressivo, Jean-Paul Sartre desenvolve uma compreensão de subjetividade que tem por base a relação dialética do homem com a história, através da qual ocorre a constituição dos valores que orientam a ação humana. Buscando analisar de queforma a narrativa literária pode auxiliar o pesquisador a compreender este processohistórico, faço a leitura reflexiva dos romances que compõem a trilogia Os caminhos da liberdade de Jean-Paul Sartre, tendo por foco as vivências do personagemMathieu Delarue. Ao possibilitar que o pesquisador acompanhe o movimento deconstituição da temporalidade de um sujeito singular, a literatura contribui para que o campo da psicologia social seja capaz de criar caminhos de compreensão darealidade humana a partir da condição de abertura própria ao jogo dialético dohomem com a história.

De la literatura y la estadística a la apropiación territorial: análisis de la narración geográfica sobre las provincias del norte neogranadinas en la segunda mitad del siglo XIX

Las obras geográficas de Manuel Ancízar y Felipe Pérez dan cuenta de la manera en la que la élite intelectual neogranadina se apropió y representó el aspecto físico y humano de la nación al inicio y final de la Comisión Corográfica (1850-1859). Un análisis comparativo de las obras mostrará la manera en la que la narración literaria y la geográfica influyen en la elaboración de imaginarios territoriales para unificar la nación y consolidar la identidad nacional a partir de la apropiación territorial en la segunda mitad del siglo XIX

Narrativas do Brasil nas memórias de Pedro Nava

This thesis is a translation of work of the Brazilian doctor, Pedro da Silva Nava (1903-1984), in particular, his memoirs and chronicles, articulated with the writings of medicine history, aiming to defend that the autobiographical narratives are sources of research capable of promoting discussions on the expansion of the present at the confluence of complex and unequal society in constant changing process as the Brazilian. The theoretical and methodological support circulates around studies, proposals and thesis by Boaventura Santos about empowering past, destabilizing subjectivity, sociology of absences, cosmopolitan reason and translation work. The empirical support drawn from the literature produced by Nava were analyzed with reference this reasoning and studies that have facilitated the flow of translation among others, the studies of Antonio Candido, Arrigucci Jr., Boris Cyrulnik, Beatriz Sarlo, Ecléa Bosi, Ítalo Calvino, José Willington Germano, José Maria Cançado, Lev Vygotsky, Marilena Chauí, Paul Ricöeur and Walter Benjamim, without neglecting what we consider indispensable to scientific research, the production of relevant knowledge and prudent, in view of a decent life. The initial inflections reflect the subject of the Memoirs and its education/training, to then place the Memoir subject in the literary context, scientific, historical and Brazilian poetic (1972-2010), bringing great interpreters and discussing the rationale used by the Narrator that we defend stand closer to the cosmopolitan, showing the formation of narratives whose presence insert itself beforehand to modernist verve, linked to the discursive array against the literature as domination space, disseminated in Brazil in the early twentieth century. So, it articulate with those in which the concerns adjust the construction of the social formation of Brazil as a national heritage through literary narrative that focuses on a historical principle that becomes the past empowering, allowing his rereading, whose converge to memory, the lifestyles, the plurality of language and Brazilian culture, formed by several people, converging into a design not of culture but multiculturalism in Brazil. The memory issue was addressed in the space-time of experiences of being that narrates, shaped by a destabilizing subjectivity that sought to order the testimony of a time, a history and society, retelling them by creative imagination, almost fictional, to make circulate his knowledge about Brazil attached to his medical knowledge, as well as other subjects in his living group and other groups with whom they maintained contact. Thus, he portrayed both tangible and intangible cultural assets of the country as a form of preservation, giving them meanings and sense. It approaches, therefore, from the perspective of sociology of absences, the expansion of the present and by the logic inherent in his narratives of self and Brazil

Estudo comparativo acerca do espaço e do tempo em O gato preto e O processo

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES)

Da leitura à literatura ao letramento literário: prática docente em foco

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES)

Uma contribuição da teoria literária para a análise de conteúdo de imagens publicitárias do fim do século XIX e primeira metade do século XX, contemplando aspectos da natureza brasileira

Pós-graduação em Ciência da Informação - FFC

Silenciosas narrativas em imagem-tempo: João Gilberto Noll, esvaziamento discursivo e cinema moderno

Este trabalho consiste num exercício de leitura da narrativa literária do escritor brasileiro João Gilberto Noll, promovendo uma aproximação de sua obra ao conceito de imagem-tempo, do filósofo Gilles Deleuze, no tocante a aspectos narrativos e à tendência ao esvaziamento discursivo, ao silêncio, enquanto elemento significativo na produção artística e tendência na arte moderna. O conceito imagem-tempo foi engendrado pelo filósofo francês para pensar o cinema moderno, que se perfaz num regime de imagens que rompe com a narratividade clássica, com a percepção baseada no esquema sensório-motor. Neste trabalho, no entanto, o conceito é pensado em relação à obra literária de João Gilberto Noll, que guarda forte relação com o cinema moderno e se nos apresenta em fragmentada tessitura imagética, tendendo ao esvaziamento discursivo. Assim, tendo como ponto de reflexão a obra de Noll, buscamos discutir como a imagem-tempo e o silêncio compõem a obra do escritor. Após apresentação e discussão do conceito de imagem-tempo e de silêncio, procedemos a uma leitura de pontos significativos da obra ficcional de Noll, ensaiando uma relação entre cinema, literatura e outras artes no que concerne basicamente à produção de imagens numa determinada forma narrativa, bem como às implicações dessas formas para o pensamento. Por uma questão de economia estratégica, para a formação de um recorte de expressão significativa da produção do escritor, suas obras diretamente consideradas neste trabalho são Hotel Atlântico (1989) e O quieto animal da esquina (1991). Pretende-se com essa relação (1) propor alguns caminhos interpretativos para a obra de Noll e (2) investigar como a produção narrativa moderna, sobretudo a que se aproxima do conceito de imagem-tempo, constituída de forte apelo visual, que se perfaz na produção de imagens ambíguas, de narrativas descontínuas, de protagonistas errantes, tende a esse esvaziamento discursivo, ao silêncio.

Vêm de Belém e vêm da Grécia! Metamorfoses: fronteiras entre narrativas orais e os mitos

A metamorfose, de acordo com Jean Chevalier e Alan Gheerbrant, é definida neste estudo como a transformação física e/ou comportamental de um ser em outro, sem a perda da identidade e ciência do primeiro ser. Esta transformação é um fenômeno recursivo em diversas mitologias e culturas. O presente trabalho tem por objetivo estabelecer, numa abordagem comparativa, as correlações e diferenças entre o tema da metamorfose recorrente nos mitos gregos relatados por Homero, em sua Odisseia, nos mitos gregos descrevidos pelo poeta latino Publius Ovidius Naso, conhecido como Ovídio, em sua obra Metamorfoses, nos cinco primeiros livros, e entre as narrativas orais que referem casos de metamorfoses ocorridos no município de Belém do Pará, inventariadas no período de 1994 a 2004. Foram consideradas as obras Odisseia e Metamorfoses por serem ambas, respectivamente, expoentes da literatura ocidental de uma Grécia dos séculos VIII a VII a.C e de uma Grécia do século I d.C retratada pelo poeta latino Ovídio, e que carregam o tema da metamorfose. Isto porque o estudo prévio ratifica a formação de índices míticos não somente nas narrativas da mitologia grega, mas também nos casos de metamorfoses oriundos de Belém. Em todo o caso, nota-se a configuração espaço-temporal como entidades que sedimentam e organizam o mundo mítico, articulando tais dimensões a representações no mundo físico-espiritual. O tema da metamorfose, contudo, é conformado de forma diferenciada, conforme o contexto histórico-cultural de cada narrativa, o que é refletido na multiplicidade de símbolos e sentidos perseguidos por cada narrativa. A fim de enriquecer o estudo dos símbolos e do contexto histórico-geográfico dos mitos gregos abordados, utilizam-se como fonte complementar os manuais de Junito Brandão, a saber, a obra Mitologia de Junito Brandão, nos volumes I, II e III, bem como os dois volumes do Dicionário Mítico-Etimológico da Mitologia Grega. Para uma análise comparativa mais eficaz, precisou-se ir além do estudo contextual de produção e representação dos códigos subjacentes a cada narrativa, pois o mito, nas palavras de Ernest Cassirer, é experimentado na consciência, porém é anterior a ela; o homem vive o mito, logo, o mito é anterior ao homem, posto que à medida que toma consciência de sua existência e das relações que tece com o mundo, o homem se vale do mito para estabelecer relações de valor e sentido, bem como representações para singularizar suas experiências. Trata-se, portanto, de uma questão filosófica de vital importância, por isso, buscou-se, para este estudo lítero-narratológico, os fundamentos da Filosofia da mitologia, junto a considerações de uma Antropologia cultural, associado ao levantamento contextual-histórico do cosmo que constitui cada narrativa, a fim de lançar bases elucidativas sobre as relações do homem com seu mundo a partir de determinadas transformações. Sob este foco, diante da pesquisa prévia das narrativas que serão analisadas, percebeu-se que as metamorfoses apresentavam maiores ocorrências quando: 1) simbolizavam o mal na figura dos metamorfoseados; 2) apresentavam motivações de cunho sexual e 3) consistiam em explicações para acontecimentos do mundo físico-espiritual. Trata-se de uma divisão metodológica que objetiva viabilizar a organização e visualização do estudo comparado. Conclui-se, então, que além de possibilitar a leitura e o conhecimento dos mitos gregos e de relatos da Amazônia pelos símbolos constituídos na consciência mítica, este estudo pode servir como uma base para verificação do exercício literário da linguagem criadora por meio do narrar, bem como ampliar a compreensão do que seja e faz a consciência humana enquanto arrimo para a difusão de comportamentos e crenças compartilhados pelo indivíduo em sociedade.

Mito e Educação no Cotidiano Escolar

Quando falamos em mito, pensamos na origem das coisas; quando falamos em cotidiano, pensamos na atualidade de que se revestem essas coisas. No entanto, para entendermos, algumas vezes, expressões utilizadas pelo povo é preciso conhecer as narrativas que nos contam a origem do mundo onde habitamos. Assim, modernamente, podemos dizer que o mito sobrevive em calendários, na liturgia, em cerimônias oficiais, preso aos rituais que comandam tais ocorrências, nas sociedades avançadas em que o homem, curvado sob o peso do tecnicismo e da barbárie mecanicista, é subjugado pelo progresso feroz que o encurrala e o faz desempenhar o papel de aprendiz de feiticeiro. Assim, se ao mito, estão entrelaçadas as nossas falas atuais, deverá ele estar presente, também, na escola e nos conteúdos trabalhados por ela para que alunos e professores possam compreender e atualizar as relações estabelecidas, ao longo do tempo, entre os fatos históricos e as narrativas que os relatam. Com esse objetivo foi desenvolvido junto à Secretaria de Educação de Rio Claro, na escola “Sérgio Hernani Fittipaldi”, o Projeto “Narrar histórias, intercambiar experiências”, financiado pelo Núcleo de Ensino da UNESP. Foram onze encontros, nos quais foram apresentados aos professores do Ensino Fundamental a arte de contar histórias, forma de conhecimento de quem somos e de como nos relacionamos com nossos semelhantes e com o mundo à nossa volta. Ao enfocarmos o gênero ficção, demos destaque, na literatura infantil aos mitos e suas transposições para a narrativa literária. Dessa forma, a primeira parte deste artigo é constituída pelo enfoque ao campo conceitual sobre o mito. A segunda parte ilustra as criações literárias que retomam os mitos, como a obra infantil de Monteiro Lobato.

Sobre O tronco, romance de Bernardo Élis

The conception of O tronco was influenced by Hegel´s ideas. The genesis of this novel is in Bernardo Élis’ purpose of writing a monograph on land ownership conflicts in Goiás, later transformed into a new project, the novel O tronco. The same ideological position of the author gives the argumentative direction of the novel; his ideological background determines the choice of the theme, associated with images expanded by the procedures of argumentation that permeate the literary discourse. Thus, in face of the undeniable aesthetic value of Élis´work, we analyzed O tronco, specifically the argumentation that guides the literary narrative, enhanced by the artistic treatment of violence, its theme, as the result of the struggle for power. The novel was published in 1956; the author, heir to the literary regionalism of the 30s, through an artistic and calculated combination of the story of a local government and literature, accuses, judges the exacerbated domination of a particular social group in a region in Goiás.

Miguilim, Thiago e a estrada

This work uses Bakhtin‟s concept of chronotope to analyze the literary narrative “Campo Geral”, by João Guimarães Rosa, and the filmic narrative Mutum, directed by Sandra Kogut. Therein, the figure of the road is considered as the starting-point for the observation of the way the relationship between time and space is constructed in both narratives.

Aspectos da linguagem e do espetáculo cinematográficos na narrativa literária brasileira do século XX

Pós-graduação em Letras - IBILCE