A Literatura comparada como heterotopologia: uma perspectiva Foucaultiana para Os sertões e O coração das trevas

Abstract

In Of Other Spaces (1967), Michel Foucault observes that since the nineteenth century the humanities have used excessively historical methods in their studies. According to aforementioned thinker, our present times would be better understood by the human sciences by means of a spatial perspective, because we live in an epoch of real time information flux, in which the simultaneity of events and the suppression of frontiers, as results of the globalization, distort any timely notion a notion that was overly diffused in Western understanding in other epochs. (Cf. FOUCAULT, 2001, p. 411). My doctorate thesis proposes to attest that comparative literature can contribute to a methodological change in humanities by adopting Foucault s theoretical criteria in spatial studies. Such criteria directs the critical analysis to the differentiated spaces of society, the heterotopias, that are counterpositions , places that are in continual tension with normal positions. In the case of literature, the heterotopias are both the real and the fictional ones, in the shape of representations inside literary discourse. According to Foucault, the fields of humanistic knowledge that want to study the heterotopias could be called Heterotopologies. In order to demonstrate the proposal of methodological change in practical terms, The present thesis applies, in its final part, a heterotopological analysis of two literary works, that have the space as an important feature from their narratives: Os Sertões (1902), written by Euclides da Cunha, and Heart of Darkness (1902), by Joseph Conrad