Manoel de Barros: Ethos e oralidade no chão do Pantanal

Abstract

This dissertation aims to analyse the poetic prose of Manoel de Barros, a writer from Mato Grosso do Sul, based on a representative corpus of the Author's complete work, trying mainly to understand it in function of the “literature of place and region” approach, where the topos of Pantanal and the matrix figurativeness of the genesis of Livro de pré-coisas – paradigmatic book of the corpus, be underlined – meet and become fundamental as operational axis of this study proposal. Starting from there, it was articulated an analysis in which Livro de pré-coisas: Roteiro para uma excursão poética no Pantanal (1984) is circumscribed as the Author’s original landscape, as it brings registered in letter and in its enunciation locus a literary cartography that identifies the universe of speech of the manoelina work. Thus, the theoretical-critical perspective of this work is based on studies of the area, above all in the aspect that those studies contemplate and seek, as démarche of a contemporary epistéme, the critical speech of the Latin-American culture. The work turns, in this way, into an analysis perspective and innovative verification inside a traditional critical view, still refractory to the intermediation links between Walter Mignolo’s “local histories / global designs”, and it demonstrates, based on the analyses, the relationships of the selected corpus – Livro de pré-coisas (1985, book of significant anteriority in the Author's complete work), Para encontrar o azul eu uso pássaros (1999), Memórias inventadas: a infância (2003), Memórias inventadas: a segunda infância (2006) and Memórias inventadas: a terceira infância (2008) – to the cultural “ground” and / or proper ethos, translated in an orality whose actualization happens on the “ground” of a private cultural area.