Tão longe, tão perto: a construção da personagem feminina em Um crime delicado, de Sérgio Sant’Anna

Abstract

This paper starts from the discussion about two proposals of reading a literary text, distant reading, and close reading, to then focus on the discursive strategies employed in the construction of the female character in the novel Um crime delicado, by Sérgio Sant’Anna, more specifically by the first-person narrator, the theater critic Antônio Martins, in the construction of the image of the model Inês Brancatti as a modest, fragile woman subordinated to a perverse tutor. In line with the imaging perspective of Daniel-Henri Pageaux (2011), we opted for a narratological approach of the character Inês Brancatti that to some extent brings together the mentioned proposals of reading (the close and the distant) through the imaging study of literature distributed on three levels of analysis: the lexicon, the hierarchical relations and the scenario, or imaginary. A close reading was then started, with a detailed examination of the lexical choices of the protagonist-narrator of Um crime delicado, followed by an appreciation of the system of characters and their hierarchies in the narrative in question, and finally a more distant reading with a view to contrasting the imaginary emerging in Sérgio Sant’Anna’s novel with a certain social imaginary