Quando o poeta diz “lata”: interconexões entre vivências, cultura e afetos na significação e criação de metáforas

Abstract

Personal and collective culture integrate and promote the development of higher psychological functions, which are associated with the creation of meaning. The understanding and use of metaphorical language require the connection between different cultural and psychological elements, constituting an intimate dialogue between developmental psychology and cultural psychology. The general objective of this thesis was to analyze the processes of literary production and signification, focusing on the relationships between person, culture, and metaphor. For this purpose, this qualitative research was conducted in three stages: 1) literary production and autoethnographic records of the researcher, as a non-professional literature writer; 2) two workshops (8 hours total) with 7 non-professional writers, for the purpose of literary signification and production; 3) individual semi-structured interviews with the 7 participants. The results produced in the three stages were analyzed in light of Semiotically-oriented Cultural Psychology, focusing on: a) the presence of everyday and affective elements in the production of metaphors; b) processes of signification of metaphorical content; c) the theoretical nature of metaphor at the border between literalness and non-literalness. As results, 30 literary texts were written by the researcher and 21 texts by the workshop participants, with 3 texts per participant. The individual interviews addressed events and affects associated with the practice of creative writing throughout each participant's personal history. The creation and signification of metaphorical texts involved aspects of the participants' lived experiences and affects, as well as elements common to collective culture, such as metaphors of butterflies or cocoons. The process of collective meaning creation was monitored in real time during the research and generated a topic of theoretical discussion about collective groupings or nuclei of meaning. The nature of metaphor at the boundary between literalness and non-literalness was theoretically addressed in accordance with the concept of psychological borders. Theoretical aspects that bring literary writing and human development closer, in a bidirectional relationship, were also discussed. Between personal and collective meanings, this work examined aspects of human development and intersubjectivity, in the approximation between culture, affects, and metaphor.