Um Relato sobre O Quarto Século: a evocação da memória pela escrita literária em Édouard Glissant e Milton Hatoum

Abstract

This doctoral thesis presents a memory studies literary analysis in the Édouard Glissant's The Fourth Century (1964) and Milton Hatoum's Tale of a Certain Orient (1989) novels, from issues related to concepts as passage of time, diaspora and memory, since they are understood as a narrative strategy and conceptual operator about literary writing in contemporaneity. Throughout this work, we analyze how narratives can evoke memory through literary writing; in order to we can investigate in literary corpus the representations of memories through narrative voices as echo violence and death in the novel narrative structures, in a comparative approach. Our analysis intends to promote a dialogue between the Theory of Literature, the Postcolonial Studies and the Contemporary Literary Criticism, in the scope of Comparative Literature. In order to do so, we start from the studies about the narrator and the author in the contemporaneity, so that we can understand how the resizing of the narrative voices in the contemporary literature, especially of subjects that historically have been silenced, it may happen. Because of the mentioned voiceless subjects aspect, the research is directed towards post-colonial studies, since the writers are Latin American, Caribbean and Brazilian, respectively, in order to understand the historical and epistemological paths that underpin their thematic choices and literary writings. In the theoretical contributions, we present specific discussions on time, memory, diaspora, orientalism and cultural hybridism concepts, in an articulated way to cultural and postcolonial studies, as well as the relations between literature and culture in Latin America, where are founded the proposed analyzes. In this way, we demonstrate how the representations of memories in the two novels converge to contemporary perspectives in literary production, in the sense of giving voice to historically excluded subjects of narratives, as well as we can be able to articulate the search for history and origin through individual and collective memory. It is from this point of view that the points of convergence between the literary works are analyzed, from analysis of how the recovered or silenced memory and the diasporic spaces dialogue through the literary writing of the studied authors, whose path is indicated by narrators and other narrative voices