Romance policial, psicanálise e cultura contemporânea em Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza e Dennis Lehane

Abstract

This dissertation aims at outlining a comparative study between the contemporary detective novel and the psychoanalytical discourse in the fictional production by Luiz Alfredo Garcia Roza (1936- ) and Dennis Lahane (1966- ), approaching particular investigative methods in literature and psychoanalysis. To do so, the corpus consists of four novels altogether: O silêncio da chuva (1996) and Espinosa sem saída (2006) by the Brazilian writer and Sagrado [Sacred] (2004) and Paciente 67 [Shutter Island] (2005) by the American fictionist. The analysis on these narratives points out similarities and idiosyncrasies between two discourses within a conflictive and chaotic cultural environment. Moreover, it highlights this new social and cultural realm where characters with undefined identities (the detective, above all) strive to evade from the atmosphere in which they are set and search for the resolution of urban crimes. As lost subjectivities, these private eyes need to decipher psychic dysfunctions of every sort of criminal thence, the representation of the city, featuring sometimes as the ground on which investigators work for the law and, at other times, as a hiding space for murderers. The relation between detective and psychoanalytic discourses remarks the association between the obscurity of the literary text and our cultural background not to mention the overall discomfort triggered by changes in contemporary societies