“Se refletir verá o quão pouco vale este seu admirador e amigo”: três decênios do epistolário machadiano

Abstract

This thesis examines the first two volumes - Tome I (1860 to 1869) and Tome II (1870 to 1889) - which integrate the Correspondência completa de Machado de Assis (The Complete Correspondence of Machado de Assis), published by The Brazilian Academy of Letters, from 2008 to 2015, in 5 volumes. It was intended, with the analysis of exchanged mails between Machado de Assis and his peers, to trace the vast lines of Machadian epistolary project, with which the writer progressively elaborates representations of himself, while building his own trajectory in the varied areas in which he acted. Therefore, the letters written in the decennia of 1860, 1870 and 1880 highlight not only the writer’s formation and path, as journalist and columnist, playwright, poet, literary critic and fictionist, but also the literary life of those decennia, moreover Machado de Assis’ performance as civil servant. Even if they re-edit certain rhetorical principles of the so called ars dictaminis, the letters of Machado de Assis, in the tomes I and II, exhibit with mastery and elegance, the precision, the grace and the aesthetic refinement that ended up characterizing the author’s writing. To better understand the epistolary genre and to substantiate the undertaken research, there has been taken as base a critical-theoretical bibliography that includes studies about the writing of oneself and about correspondence as a genre, with emphasis to the reflections of Michel Foucault (2004), Brigitte Diaz (2016) and Geneviève Haroche-Bouzinac (2016)