Em busca de uma essência poética: a expressividade do substantivo em João Cabral de Melo Neto

Abstract

This dissertation, while analyzing the expressiveness of the noun in João Cabral de Melo Neto s work, aims to contribute to a productive teaching of the mother tongue when it conceives grammar materialized in texts. The noun, as seen by traditional grammar within the limits of morphology and syntax is now perceived as a creative element of a referential net as it builds a determined discourse object, as postulated by the assumptions of Textual Linguistics. I assume this point of view to put the stylistic analysis into a new perspective. I aimed to develop, observing the word class in question, specially as an aesthetic factor responsible for the expressive naked diction which the poet look into. In his poetic labour, the poet was against the common poetic genre, the appreciation for the rhyme and musicality, the exploration of abstract connotations, the immersion in the individual s self , the metrics, the self-confession stressed by the usage of the first person singular. Getting far from this perspective, Cabral becomes notorious among the modernists that were attentive to the freedom of speech and of thought and to the artistic expression, as well as being one of the few to produce an aesthetics based on the less and on the subtraction of the linguistics forms, focusing on a more concrete lexicus in the border of the abstract, the option for the descriptive macro structure in the materialization of the exterior of reality and the immersion in the syntactic rhythm overlapping the metric syllables in the breakthrough of the frontiers between prose and poetry. All these things considered, I privileged the morphosyntax of the noun as a resource vastly appreciated when translating the obsessive thinking in regards to the sugar cane fields in Pernambuco and Spanish dancers. In A Dog Without Feathers (1950), I privileged the subject as an informative topic that coincides, in the text, with the formal, semantic and stylistic-discursive functions. In A Knife All Blade (1955), the noun is analyzed in the perspective of inversions, split in linguistics literature as hiperbaton, anastrophe, and procatalepsis, whereas in Quaderna (1959), the last work of the corpus, I selected nine poems that talk about women, something unusual in Cabral´s work, and I focused on the study of the noun as a nuclei of noun phrases linked to prepositional phrases in order to project, in wholeness, the characterization of the referred term, infected by the beliefs and by the eye of the enunciator-poet