Elementos da razão turva em crônicas da Belle Époque: percepção, choque e técnica na literatura de João do Rio e Lima Barreto

Abstract

The thesis presents the relationship between literature and technique, in the context of the modernization of perception and urban experience, in the first decades of the twentieth century, through the chronicles of João do Rio and Lima Barreto. In addition, it sought to examine the mutations that modern subjectivity has undergone, especially with regard to the individual's differences in perception, his new spatio-temporal relations, linked and related to the development of new communication, information and displacement technologies. The main starting point was the analysis of the concept of neurological modernity, based on the reflections of Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer and Georg Simmel. These thinkers fixed themselves on the idea that such a conception provoked a new record of subjective experience, characterized by physical and perceptive shocks. According to FIGUEIREDO (2019, p. 269), “Technological and economic changes have profoundly affected the structure of subjective experience, altering its physiological and psychological bases with frequent and intense sensory stimuli in the chaotic, fragmented and unfamiliarized space of the city.”. In other words, the individual, exposed to such transformations, came to have a different perspective not only about what he observes, but what has changed in itself, due to such changes. In the wake of Profª. Flora Sussekind, in Cinematógrafo das letras (1987), in which she suggests a history of Brazilian literature that takes into account her “relations with a history of the means and forms of communication”, this study presented the way in which literature assimilated these innovations .In other words, what Sussekind sought to do was to examine how the approximation of literature to the technical horizon starts to “shape” cultural production: “It is no longer a matter of investigating only how literature represents technique, but how, appropriating from procedures concerning photography, cinema, the poster, literary technique itself is transformed ”. (SUSSEKIND, F., 1987, p. 15). This thesis went further, that is, it sought to deepen the studies in the theorists who discussed the neurological conception of modernity and identified, in chronicles of the first two decades of the twentieth century, the referred conception, or rather, analyzed the issue of mutations why it passed modern subjectivity with regard to the perception and the role and relevance of the writers João do Rio and Lima Barreto, in translating the impacts of modernization on individual and subjective experience.