Com base em textos autobiográficos dos ficcionistas Jorge Luis Borges, José Saramago e Umberto Eco, dos físicos Albert Einstein e Richard Feynman, e do biólogo e psicólogo Jean Piaget, o trabalho examina os percursos e procedimentos de aprendizagem desses expertos nas áreas de Literatura e Ciências, em conjunto com a construção da subjetividade que emerge da escrita autobiográfica. Considerando as condições instáveis do objeto de investigação -- uma epistemologia pessoal e incompleta, depreendida de um relato evocado pela memória -- o trabalho enfoca tais autobiografias do ponto de vista da estrutura narrativa, ou seja, como a forma da escritura expressa um conteúdo complexo: o sujeito e seu conhecimento, o sujeito que se constrói emaranhado ao saber que traz sentido à vida e ao próprio relato da vida. Para a interpretação das autobiografias são utilizados procedimentos da teoria literária, bem como fundamentos da psicologia, psicanálise e epistemologia; ancorada na análise do texto, a interpretação abrange a avaliação do papel da afetividade, da educação formal e informal e do contexto histórico e sócio-cultural na constituição do conhecimento em sujeitos, cujo itinerário cognitivo se concretizou em obras consagradas universalmente. Para além da descrição e confirmação de talentos, o que se pretende, sobretudo, é discutir a abrangência desses relatos singulares sobre as condições para descobertas, aquisições e transformações de saberes e, conseqüentemente, sobre a acessibilidade potencial do conhecimento a todos os homens. / Based on autobiographical texts by the writers Jorge Luis Borges, José Saramago and Umberto Eco, the physicists Albert Einstein and Richard Feynman, and the psychologist and biologist Jean Piaget, this work examines how the process of growing up and learning contributes to constructing the subjectivity that emerges from the autobiographical writings of these experts in the areas of Literature and Sciences. Taking into account the unstable conditions of the object of investigation -- the personal and incomplete epistemology derived from a text evoked by memory -- this work focuses on such autobiographies from the point of view of their narrative structure, that is, how the way of writing expresses a complex content: the subject and his knowledge, the individual entangled in the very knowledge that brings sense to life and to the retelling of life. In order to interpret the autobiographies, literary theory is used, as well as founding principles of psychology, psychoanalysis, and epistemology; anchored in text analysis, the interpretation reaches into the evaluation of the role of affection, of formal and informal education, and of the historical, social and cultural contexts in the building of knowledge in individuals whose cognitive processes were made concrete in their universally acclaimed works. More than the mere description and confirmation of talents, this paper discusses the relevance of these singular texts to the discoveries, acquisitions and transformation of different intelligences and, consequently, how others may access this knowledge.

No description available.

Orientador: Maria Rosa Rodrigues Martins de Camargo / Banca: Agueda Bernadete Bittencourt Uhle / Banca: João Antônio Telles / Resumo: Cartas pessoais, escritas em diferentes épocas e lugares compõem o objeto material deste estudo. Na sua leitura destaca-se a figura dos interlocutores, cuja história e modo de vida estão inscritos nesse complexo suporte de texto. A qualidade dialógica do material pesquisado se estende à abordagem da própria pesquisa, tal como concebida por Bakhtin na área das Humanidades. Geradas e preservadas pelas práticas culturais disseminadas de escrita e leitura em nossa sociedade, as cartas pesquisadas, cento e setenta e nove no total, são focalizadas na perspectiva da História Cultural. De sua leitura, emerge ainda a possibilidade para reflexões acerca da escrita de si, isto é, da escrita epistolar como material autobiográfico. Questões da temporalidade também emergem da leitura do material e remetem a estudos de filósofos como Paul Ricoeur e Peter Pál Pelbart, entre outros. / Abstract: Personal letters, written in different times and places, compose the material object of this study. By reading them, stands out the figure of their interlocutors, whose history and way of life are registered in this complex support of text. The dialogical quality of the investigated material is spread out to the approach of the inquiry itself, such as conceived by Bakhtin, to researches in the area of the Humanities. Produced and preserved by the cultural disseminated practices of writing and reading, that take place in our society, the investigated letters, hundred and seventy nine in the total, are focused in the perspective of the Cultural History. By reading them, another possibility for reflections is brought up, which is, the reflexive writing, or, the epistolary writing as an autobiographical subject. Questions of temporality also emerge in the reading of such material, and lead us to studies of philosophers like Paul Ricoeur and Peter Pál Pelbart, among others. / Mestre

Le présent travail s’est proposé d’analyser avec les outils de la linguistique textuelle les autobiographies des jeunes Allemands de l’Est après 1989 souvent présentées comme inclassables dans le genre autobiographique. Il s’ouvre sur une description de la position interdisciplinaire adoptée dans ce travail de linguistique textuelle qui porte sur un corpus de textes relevant du discours littéraire tout en investissant des notions de l’analyse de discours s’inscrivant dans la tradition de Michel Foucault. Il se poursuit avec l’analyse des spécificités énonciatives, pragmatiques, thématiques et stylistiques des autobiographies des jeunes Allemands de l’Est après 1989, sur lesquelles se fonde leur appréhension en termes d’autobiographies contre-discursives, genre textuel désignant une sous-variante autobiographique produite par des auteurs-narrateurs marginalisés dans la réalité socio-historique, à destination du centre discursif, en réaction au discours dominant dont ils sont l’objet et qu’ils réfutent. Enfin ce travail propose une analyse détaillée des lexèmes nominaux composés ayant pour déterminant Ost- ou West- et à leur mise en texte dans les autobiographies des jeunes Allemands de l’Est après 1989. Parmi ces dénominations référant aux réalités de l’Est et de l’Ouest, certains complexes nominaux peuvent être qualifiés de composés phraséologiques : éléments linguistiques clés dans la diffusion des stéréotypes du discours sur l’Est, ils donnent lieu dans les textes du corpus à de nombreuses [dé]constructions lexicales permettant une critique du discours dominant, qui illustre la dimension défensive du contre-discours autobiographique est-allemand. / Through the use of text linguistics tools, this work aims to analyse the post 1989 autobiographies of young East Germans, which are often considered to be unclassifiable in the autobiographic genre. It starts with a description of the interdisciplinary position adopted in this text linguistics work. While focussing on a corpus of literary discourse texts it invests notions of discourse analysis which fall within the tradition of Michel Foucault. It continues with the analysis of the enunciative, pragmatic, thematic and stylistic specificities of these post 1989 autobiographies, which reveal, through a counter-discursive text type, the apprehension of their young East German authors. This text type refers to an autobiographic subvariant produced by author-narrators who have been marginalised from the social-historic reality, with a discursive purpose in reaction to the dominant discourse of which they are the objects and which they refute. La! stly, this work offers a detailed analysis of nominal compound lexemes having Ost- or West- as their determiner and their inclusion in the text of these post 1989 autobiographies of young East Germans. Among these denominations referring to East and West realities, certain nominal compounds can be qualified by phraseological compounds: as key linguistic elements in the diffusion of East discourse stereotypes they give rise, in the corpus texts, to numerous lexical [de]constructions which allow a criticism of the dominant discourse, thereby illustrating the defensive dimension of the East German counter-discourse autobiographies.

Notion vaste, vague, ambigüe, le surnaturel est un thème très présent dans les écrits de Daniel Defoe. Il est mis en question, voire évacué par la raison au siècle des Lumières. Defoe quant à lui, adopte une argumentation empirique pour défendre l’existence du surnaturel contre l’athéisme. A travers les sens, les composantes de son monde surnaturel comme peste, tempête, fantôme, Dieu et diable se manifestent. Cette écriture sensible le rend crédible. Le surnaturel apparaît aussi à travers les personnages. Leur relationnel est parfois caractérisé par la diabolisation de l’autre. Durant leur parcours, les héros vivent un déchirement entre le bien et le mal, entre Dieu et diable. Defoe souligne à travers son exploration de leur psychologie un surnaturel trompeur produit de la mélancolie, de la folie. Mais le surnaturel est aussi un ingrédient littéraire attrayant qui répond à une réalité du marché du livre. Defoe utilise l’autobiographie s’alliant l’éditeur et le lecteur pour tisser le vraisemblable et conférer crédibilité au surnaturel. Le romancier fait du temps et de l’espace un vecteur d’évaluation face au surnaturel mais ils ancrent aussi le monde invisible dans le réel. L’usage des sens permet de créer une esthétique du surnaturel qui révèle des émotions proches de « l’âme sensible ». De plus, la diversité des styles d’écriture complique la tâche de l’identification générique quant au surnaturel. Celui-ci se positionne ainsi entre l’apologétique qui le présente sous des aspects vraisemblables et le romanesque qui l’introduit dans une esthétique de l’étrange. Cette ambivalence fait de Defoe un précurseur, dont la postérité met en relief le modernisme. / A vast, vague and an ambiguous notion, the supernatural is an omnipresent theme in the writings of Daniel Defoe. The supernatural is questioned and even erased by reason in the age of the Enlightenment. Defoe adopts an empirical argumentation to defend the existence of the supernatural against atheism. He reveals the elements of his supernatural world such as the plague, storm, ghost, God and devil through the senses. Defoe’s writing style based on senses makes the supernatural credible. The supernatural is also made manifest through characters. Their relationship is sometimes characterized by the demonization of one another. Besides, during their life, characters balance between good and evil, between God and devil. Through the exploration of their psychology, Defoe shows an imaginary supernatural, a product of melancholy and madness. The supernatural is also an attractive literary ingredient which answers to a book trade reality. Defoe uses the form of autobiography making the editor and the reader his allies to build up the plausibility of his work and make the supernatural credible. Time and space are employed by the novelist as means, of self-evaluation for his characters vis-à-vis of the supernatural; at the same time, they anchor the invisible in reality. The use of senses helps to create an aesthetic style of the supernatural which reveals emotions close to “Sensitive Soul”. Furthermore, the diverse styles make it difficult to define the literary genre of the supernatural. It is half-way between the apologetic which presents it as plausible and the fictional which introduces it in an aesthetic style of the strange. This ambivalence makes Defoe a pioneer of the novel whose posterity highlights his modernism.

My dissertation examines the ways that canine roles affect genre—the categories into which we place works of literature, which shape their forms and which in turn shape our expectations of what we read. For instance, if epitaphs and elegies are at least partially meant to usher the dead into heaven and praise the dead’s suitability for a Christian afterlife, what happens when the subject is a dog denied a soul by Christianity? These are the kinds of questions I address. In addition to epitaphs and elegies, I consider detective and sensation fiction as well as dog autobiographies—works of fiction written from the dog’s perspective—to explore how taking the dog as a subject forced the conventions of certain genres to change, or in the case of detective and sensation fiction, how dog-like ways of knowing helped to birth a new genre altogether. In either case, what is important is that the generic changes signal a less human-centered approach to literature: one which opens animals up to be the possessors of souls, intelligence, and subjectivity. These changes paved the way for the Victorians to consider animals as beings worthy of compassion and respect.

The task of documenting the evolution of the self over time has been attempted by women artists throughout history. The practice of this documentation has been greatly enhanced in the last several years by the progression of new technologies for the capture of digital images, the advent of the internet as a common textual and visual communication device, and the availability of free resources to publish and disseminate the resulting constructions. Women artists now have the tools needed to document the life of the self, and to publish it immediately to an audience. Most of the women documenting their lives on-line, in real time, do not consider themselves to be artists, and the art world has yet to embrace their practice as artistic activity. But as documents of women's performance, these sites are important historical, visual and cultural occurrences. In addition to containing both textual and visual elements, these endeavors incorporate and elucidate the concept of performativity of gender. In watching these sites (cams and blogs) of women's performance over time, it becomes clear that identities are complex constitutive creations, on both sides of the computer screen. The women of this study are doing, making and inventing a way to assemble the stories of their lives for a reading and looking audience in a manner that calls attention to the way all subjects are made by language and culture. The sites of these productions, located in the space of the internet, offer the spectator an opportunity to interface and form relationships with visual materials and contents. In the space opened up between viewer and artist/performer, identity work can be accomplished and the masquerade of femininity can be critically assessed in new and engaging ways. The challenge and the promise of this research: the journey into the spaces of these sites, with all of their varied formations of identity and performance as woman, will provide a document that both claims these practices as unique artistic performances of self and delineates new possibilities for looking.

American Mnemonic: Racial Identity in Women’s Life Writing of the Civil War takes up three American women's autobiographies: Emilie Davis’s pocket diaries (1863-65), Elizabeth Keckley’s Behind the Scenes: Thirty Years a Slave and Four in the White House (1868), and Louisa May Alcott’s Hospital Sketches (1863). Chapter one is devoted to literary review and methodology. Chapter two, "the all-absorbing topic': Belonging and Isolation in Emilie Davis’s Diaries," explores the everyday record of Emilie Davis in the context of Philadelphia’s free black community during the war. Davis’s position as a working-class free woman offers a fresh perspective on the much-discussed “elite” black community in which she participated. Chapter three, “'The Past is Dear': Nostalgia and Geotemporal Distance in Elizabeth Keckley’s Behind the Scenes,” explores Keckley’s memories of the South as she narrates them from her position as an upwardly mobile free black woman in Washington, D.C. My analysis illuminates the effect of shifting subject positions (e.g., from slave to free) on the process of self-narration, a process that I argue ultimately recasts Keckley in a more abolitionist light. Finally, chapter four, “'A Forward Movement': Louisa May Alcott’s Hospital Sketches and the Racialized Temporality of Progress,” argues that Alcott uses the geotemporal conditions of the war hospital to gain social mobility. This forward movement for Alcott leads her to cast black characters in a regressive light, revealing the racial hierarchy of progress. All of these authors express their experiences of time in unique ways, but in each case, the temporal cultural shifts catalyzed by the Civil War impact how they process their racial identities, and the genre of autobiography offers an intimate view of that process.

Where We Belong: Spatial Imagining in American Women’s Life Narratives, 1859-1912, studies three marginalized and disadvantaged American women’s self-life narratives during a transitional period in American history. In this dissertation, I am taking an interdisciplinary approach. Where We Belong borrows from social geography, new materialism, and autobiography studies in order to complicate critical discussions of women’s space and place in nineteenth-century women’s self-life narratives. Each chapter of Where We Belong presents a case study with the goal to provide a broader understanding of women’s strategies of belonging due to and despite their spatial exclusions. The overarching emphasis in each chapter remains on the female body’s spatial movement. Exploring Eliza Potter’s A Hairdresser’s Experience in High Life (1859), Elizabeth Keckley’s Behind the Scenes; Or Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House (1868), and Mary Antin’s The Promised Land (1912), I claim that material spaces and these women’s corporeal bodies are inseparable. The three cases I present in this project exemplify how marginal women develop strategies of belonging in spaces from which they have been excluded. These women demonstrate ways of belonging (where they are assumed not to) enacted by self-life narratives. Belonging is not a passive way of being: it is activism that disrupts strict categories and definitions, such as blackness, in American literary scholarship. It contains paradoxes of acquiescence and self-declaration.

Orientador: Arlindo Rebechi Junior / Banca: Marcelo Magalhães Bulhões / Banca: Jefferson Agostini Mello / Resumo: Maura Lopes Cançado, uma escritora de carreira breve, publicou, em 1965, sua primeira obra, Hospício é Deus: diário I, um diário autobiográfico sobre seus dias de clausura em instituições psiquiátricas, dando ênfase para as críticas ao sistema manicomial. Por outro lado, João Moreira Salles, em 2007, lançou o documentário Santiago, no qual revisita a própria história por meio das lembranças do mordomo que trabalhou para os Moreira Salles por mais de três décadas. As duas obras em questão, Hospício é Deus: diário I (1965) e Santiago (2007) foram selecionadas para compor o corpus das análises comparativas desta pesquisa, uma vez que se constituem como narrativas singulares com traços autobiográficos a partir da perspectiva de Vapereau (1876) e Leonor Arfuch (2002), autores que ampliam as definições do gênero, chamando de autobiografia todo discurso cujo autor teve a intenção, secreta ou confessa, de contar trechos ou partes inteiras de sua vida. Intenciona-se, portanto, partindo da perspectiva comparativa destes discursos autobiográficos construídos a partir de sistemas sígnicos distintos, promover uma reflexão acerca dos limites normativos deste gênero do discurso, assim como uma ponderação sobre a conceituação tradicionalista proposta por Lejeune (1975) e as implicações da necessidade restritiva de um pacto para posicionar um discurso no espaço biográfico que reúne as narrativas do eu / Abstracts: Maura Lopes Cançado, a short career writer, published in 1965 her first work, Hospício é Deus: diário I, an autobiographical diary about her cloistered days in psychiatric institutions, with emphasis on criticism of the asylum system. On the other hand, João Moreira Salles released, in 2007, the documentary Santiago, in which he revisits his own history through the memories of the butler who worked for the Moreira Salles for more than three decades. The two works in question, Hospício é Deus: diário I (1965) and Santiago (2007) were selected to compose the corpus of comparative analyzes of this research, since they constitute singular narratives with autobiographical traits from the perspective of Vapereau 1876) and Leonor Arfuch (2002), authors who expand the definitions of the genre, calling autobiography every speech whose author had the intention, secret or confessed, to tell parts or whole parts of his life. It is therefore intended, starting from the comparative perspective of these autobiographical discourses constructed from distinct sign systems, to promote a reflection on the normative limits of autobiography as a genre of discourse, as well as a consideration of the traditionalist conceptualization proposed by Lejeune (1975) and the implication of the restrictive need for a pact to position a discourse in the biographical space that brings together the narratives of the self / Mestre