Discursos sobre a infância na poesia de Arnaldo Antunes e de Manoel de Barros

Abstract

In this investigation, we propose to work on the analysis of literary discourse, more precisely with poems by Arnaldo Antunes (1960-present) and Manoel de Barros (1916-2014), two writers of Brazilian literature who recurrently address childhood in their works. The researcher's observation in relation to the poems of these poets, in view of the construction of knowledge established in their statements, provoked a concern regarding the theme. Although these are two writers who present sharp distinctions, both in their sociocultural aspects and in their trajectories in the literary world, it is possible to see that something brings them together: childhood. While Antunes began his career in music, in the rock scene of the 1980s and later dedicated himself to literary writing itself, Barros introduces his entry into writing in the 1930s and travels for decades in this universe until the mid-1930s. 2010. The peculiar characteristics of these poets of constructing subjects based on rupture and transgression give clues to a possible approximation, but we are not limited to this point, as we are also heading towards the discrepancies found in these two literary universes. And in this way we configure our research objective: to carry out a comparative discursive analysis between these two poets, with an emphasis on the construction of childhood(s) materialized in their speeches. Such investigation is justified by the relevance of these writers in Brazilian literature and that it can contribute to the advancement of literary discursive studies, through other possibilities in this field of knowledge linked to linguistic studies. That said, we delimited our corpus with clipping poems from 6 (six) books, 3 (three) from each poet. By Arnaldo Antunes: Everything (1991); The Things (1992) and Nome (1993) and Manoel de Barros: The book of ignorance (1993); Book about Nothing (1996) and Exercises of Being a Child (1999). The previous reading of these works, due to their discursive constructions linked to knowledge and subjectivities that are directed towards the construction of typical childhood subjects, allowed us to take as theoretical-methodological support for the analysis some assumptions of Michel Foucault, a thinker who has contributed to the investigations in the area of discursive studies and that enable an analytical work with various types of materialities, including literature. From Foucault, we explore some basic concepts for the analytical engagement in question, such as subject, subjectivity, truth, being of language and transgression, which populate our investigative gaze in theoretical and analytical instances. Divided into 4 (four) chapters, this thesis addresses concepts that we propose to develop in order to enable comparative analyzes between the two poets, such as language and childhood, transgression and being of language, subject and childhood genealogy, memory and subjectivity, issues that we tried to make explicit in this investigative process. Through the analyses, we find that these writers, in the exercise of the author function, build subjects linked to childhood, who come closer, in view of the knowledge mobilized for this possibility, given the transgression and resistance of legitimate knowledge to the detriment of the construction and differentiated relationships others, who construct subjectivities through a literary language. But there are also distinctions in the elaborate forms of these discourses, that in Antunes there is a more concrete subject, constructed with characteristic elements of a given social reality and marked by the here now; and in Barros we find more utopian elements, emphasizing the past tense, as someone who appreciates leaving the discursive logic and entering the outside, in the external universe, typical of literary discourse, which is related to childhood.