Nos gases eu me formei (poeta): Stella do Patrocínio e os recursos expressivos em Reino dos bichos e dos animais é o meu nome

Abstract

This work aims to research the expressive resources that define the poetics of Stella do Patrocínio, a victim of the institutionalization of individuals considered insane. At the age of 21, she was involuntarily committed to an insane asylum in Rio de Janeiro. She lived for four years at Pedro II Hospital, before being transferred to the Colônia Juliano Moreira, a “psychiatric colony”, where she spent the rest of her life. It was there that Stella participated in the Livre Expressão Artística project [Free Artistic Expression project], which aimed to humanize the treatment of psychiatric patients and to open the doors of the insane asylum, providing the integration of the psychiatrized individual with society. At that moment, she had the opportunity to express herself through her “falatório”, her flow of speech, highly charged with affectivity. She then had her speech recorded, transcribed and published as poetry in the book Reino dos bichos e dos animais é o meu nome, organized by Viviane Mosé, a material that makes up the corpus of this research. Some of the still preserved audio recordings recorded by Carla Guagliardi, the project's intern at the time, are also used for the sake of comparison with the transcribed texts. It is the problematization of the lack of visibility of that artistic product that justifies this research. Therefore, we propose to analyze it. To this end, first, the work briefly addresses the concept of schizophrenia and its manifestation in language. Subsequently, it uses a theoretical framework based on Stylistics, from the phonic, lexical and syntactic point of view, also highlighting repetition, metalinguistic activity in literature, and metaphor as expressive resources. This work also uses concepts of Cognitive Linguistics (CL), such as Lakoff and Johnson’s Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT). Finally, we selected some of Stella do Patrocínio’s texts so as to analyze her expressive marks in order to characterize in this way the author's style.