Performances ensaísticas na crítica brasileira contemporânea

Abstract

This work aims to analyze, from a bibliographic and comparative perspective, the critical activities of Roberto Corrêa dos Santos, Ana Cristina de Rezende Chiara, Denilson Lopes, Diana Klinger, and Alberto Pucheu by surveying their published works over recent decades. It focuses on the rhetorical and theoretical resources employed in critical production that dramatizes the presence of the subject and literary resources in its formulation. The investigation of this corpus seeks to underline and illustrate the textual, discursive, thematic, and methodological shifts in the approach of these essayists, highlighting the main elements that constitute their writings. To this end, essential reading operators for the development of investigations about the critics were employed, such as the notions of essay, performance, and affect, discussed by researchers like Francisco Bosco (2017), Paulo Roberto Pires (2018), Max Bense (2018), Néstor García Canclini (2014), Paul Zumthor (2018), Marvin Carlson (2009, 2010), Gonzalo Aguilar and Mario Cámara (2017), Alex Beigui (2011), José Gil (2002), Luciana di Leone (2014), Patrícia T. Clough (2010), among others. The work also aims to situate these productions in a postmodern or contemporary context, as analyzed by Linda Hutcheon (1991), Stuart Hall (2005), Giorgio Agamben (2009), Ieda Magri (2020), Lionel Ruffel (2014), in dialogue with what has been termed the biographical space, defined by the display of the self in the humanities, according to researchers such as Leonor Arfuch (2010), Ana Cláudia Viegas (2010), Paula Sibilia (2008), and Eneida Maria de Souza (2011). The thesis revisits the contributions of poststructuralism in Brazil and the essayistic engagement by intellectuals in academia, which helped pave the way for the literary critics' experimentation discussed in this study. This work also includes a brief historical retrospective to understand this process, with considerations regarding biographical criticism produced in the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries, given the connection between art and life, pointing out differentiations and similarities concerning biographical practice in the present and the past. Along this path, the importance of structuralism and the diffusion of its premises in Brazil is also highlighted, enabling a departure from the dilettantism of impressionistic criticism and the implementation of greater systematization in national criticism. The thesis advocates the idea that the essayistic productions of the analyzed authors, while drawing from the analytical rigor achieved by Brazilian literary criticism, also began to be characterized by their commitment to destabilizing routine intellectual habits and creatively experimenting with the open space of the page, promoting an interface with other spheres of knowledge and the arts. The essayists incorporate into their investigative processes the desire to affect their readers through multiple discursive tactics that turn critical writing into a project intended to be affective and sensory, while also claiming the right for the author to be part of the study they produce.