Estruturas fundamentais dos gêneros literários: narração e descrição, regularidade e irregularidade

Abstract

All reflexions about literary genres throughout Western history lead, no matter how, to the affirmation of a duality of compositive practices that structure the most various literary genres historically constituted: the process of narrating and describing. While the former incorporates the temporal aspect of human experience, stressing causality, hierarchy, universality and parts subordination to a whole, the last incorporates the spatial aspect of human experience, stressing random, particularity and coordinative permutation of the parts of a whole. Narration and description, each one with very defining stylistic qualities, convey antithetical world s visions, although complementary. Because are concerned with the ultimate meaning of the works, they can be called morphosemantic principles of literary works construction. Nonetheless, these principles do not comprehend all the differentiating aspects of the works. As occurs in the level of the text s ultimate meaning, the duality universal/particular mirrors itself in the language s materiality, by this way establishing the distinction between structures of regular elocution and structures of irregular elocution. There is put after all the axe of the canonic separation between lyric and epic, the former more irregular, the last more regular. It is in question, in this separation, the morphologic principles of literary work s construction. The two orders of principles converge in a way that narration implies regularity while description implies irregularity