Memory and imagination in the novels by Antonio Torres: the self-constitution on the border between the backwoods and the city

Abstract

This project proposes a comparative study of the novels "Essa terra" (1976), "O cachorro e o lobo" (1997) and "Pelo fundo da agulha" (2006), by Antônio Torres. Taking the memorialist and imaginary elements as analysis object, will be examined the way as the narrator articulates them in the three novels's plots. In these, the action is developed, predominantly, inside the narrator-characters's thought o, where the time and the space are subjectived, appearing to be fragmented categories. The peculiarities about the narrative structure will be analyzed, focusing the used procedures to express the temporality and the spatiality for the constitution of the memory and the creative imagination in the novels, looking for to establish an interrelation of these aspects with the subject. The analysis of the development of the space and the time also aims to follow the character-narrators in its psychological representations, as well as to show how the elements that constitute the memorialism in the three narratives they identify with the after modern look. We interpret the representation of the memory and the imagination of the narrators, for resorting to the same subjects - the universe of the rootlessness man in the oppressive environment of the contemporary great city -, as an attempt of the writer to recoup the identity of the emigrant from the brazilian northeastern. Opting to the psicho-sociological narrative, he makes of the social and cultural aspects of the city, in contrast with the ones of the backwoods, basic substance of its plots, establishing an interdependence between the man and the space. Considering the formal and thematic aspects to be explored, the objective of the project is to verify as the aesthetic manifestations of modernity reflect the crisis's constant state that goes through the literature by Antônio Torres, revealed for its narrators, whose behavior discloses the man contemporary's conflicts on the way of the generalized relativization of values and principles. (AU)