Contar histórias para poder viver: as corporeidades articuladas nos ensaios "Rastejando até Belém" e "O Álbum Branco", de Joan Didion

Abstract

The present work seeks to analyze how corporeities emerge, and are articulated in the essays “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” and “The White Album”, by Joan Didion. It is considered how the author elaborates them, as an element of her prose, and their relationship with the perspectives developed in the so-called “New Journalism”, of which she is considered one of the exponents. The essays were selected due to their articulations regarding the 60s and 70s in the United States, marked by transgressions and social movements in which the body emerges in different ways. The analysis of the texts resulted in perceptions of corporeality articulated with issues of politics, violence, gender, aesthetics and health, based on reports about herself and others. Didion's work, which still has a discreet presence in Brazil, also proves to be productive for analyzing writing about pain, illnesses and ailments, as it exposes and reclaims their vulnerabilities as differences and characteristics of a unique style.