O Cordel em geopoesia centroestina: estradas e versos de Paulo Nunes Batista

Abstract

This thesis aims to explore some of the nuances of Cerrado cordel poetry, made in Goiás. For this purpose, in light of the theoretical field of geopoetry, we followed the paths of searching for the literature that, in large part, does not integrate the hegemonic cabinets – Goiás literature – funneling into the aspect called popular literature. The first motivating question was: is there cordel literature made in Goiás? And given the positive response, it was possible to better understand this centroestino cordel, its origins and characteristics. With this focus and following some initial paths of bibliographical search, we came up with the name of the writer Paulo Nunes Batista, which emerged with great evidence of having been one of the greatest (if not the greatest) popular poets to produce cordel literature in Goiás. After in-depth research, the indication was confirmed that there would be a great legacy of this writer born in Paraíba and migrated to Goiás in the mid-1940s, whose dedication to popular and erudite literature exceeded the six-decade mark, having lived exclusively from income obtained through the sale of cordel leaflets, between the 1950s and 1960s, in the capital and in some interior cities in the state of Goiás, factors that instigated questions about where all this cordelistic work could be found and why there was no dissemination of it in the spaces of state literary circulation. Based on these concerns, the intention was to access the existing collection and to this end a geopoetic path was taken: to go in search of what was hidden until then, in Anápolis, a city that was the geopoet's home until his death, in end of 2019. Having accessed part of the collection, the research unfolded to select, among the very valuable files, the corpus for the current study, which consisted mainly of ABC’s cordel, the Paulo Nunes Batista’s specialty, in which he talked about Goiani(ci)dades with the eyes of a Benjaminian flâneur. The corpus analyzed here is part of a very rich historiographical material of Goiás culture and this work aims to elucidate points that, not having been recorded in the standardized means of telling the history, were recorded from the look and poetic song of the geopoeta-cordelista paraibano-goiano, the "lavrador de palavras".