Considerações sobre uma teoria em ruínas: o olhar trágico na ficção de Michel Laub

Abstract

The research presented in this dissertation is based on the study of contemporary fiction in order to rethink some tragic theories given the changing needs of contemporary novel. The corpus of this work is the engine's fictional novel Diary of a fall (2011), by Gaucho Michel Laub. In this novel, whose themes revolve around the historical and personal tragedies of commonplace subjects, the traumatic events of Auschwitz bring a critical reflection on the tragic condition of being in the world. The convulsions of history and the ruins of the past, the war, the trauma, the condition of the subject that tells your own downfall and the incorporation of historical account in the daily lives of the characters ficcionalized by Laub guide us to the focal point of our investigation: the tragic experience to narrate the tragedy and the tragic look in the history. In this way, the aim of this dissertation is to analyze another chance to think about the tragedy that there is no foundation in a closed and rigid concept, but that can be thought with a different meaning as a way to traverse the depths of our history and unveil the squalid genealogy of blood and terror that here we call as contemporary tragedies. We will look at how the Laub s fiction places a tragic look at the world s history not only fixing the need to rethink the notion of tragic and tragedy, but also his own reflection on the idea of history. In this way, the theoretical construction of this research framework in studies on the hottest issues between contemporaneity and history, from authors such as Eric Hobsbawm and Walter Benjamin. The dialogue established with the theoretical propositions of Terry Eagleton helps us rescue the tragic as a the idea of a theory in ruin, that allows us to look fragmentally at history. Raymond Williams work guides us theoretically with other possibilities for the idea of tragedy, already considering catastrophic events of history as tragedy spread throughout the centuries in different forms of massacre, genocides, or any event in ordinary life and daily basis. The formulations of Eagleton, Benjamin, Williams and Hobsbawm allow us to study history as a chain of disasters which we may call as contemporary tragedies. The idea of theory in ruins is part of a reinvigoration of the theoretical apparatus about the tragedy from long's contributions on the tragic contemporary theories. We will look carefully at new ways and different possibilities to get the tragic from a different perspective, and for that, it is necessary to ruin and deconstruct the traditional notions about the tragic.