Favelada e escritora: Carolina Maria de Jesus, a instituição literária e a escrita romanesca

Abstract

The main goal of this dissertation is to study two novels by Carolina Maria de Jesus (Pedaços da fome – Pieces of hunger – and Dr. Silvio), in order to analyze, from Bakhtin’s theories on dialogism and the novel genre, the discursive appropriations carried out by her from writing models inherited from the 19th century. In order to achieve this goal, we considered it would be also interesting to study her biography, both by means of autobiographical texts as well as by the accounts of other people that knew her personally, with a special attention to the construction of her image as a black and poor woman, but predestined, despite all, to become a writer. After the great success of Quarto de despejo – Child of the dark – a best-seller published in the 60s (which allowed her to leave her condition as a favela dweller and occupy spaces reserved to the cultural elite), Carolina makes an effort to build an image of a writer, obtaining only an ephemeral success and stablishing a conflicted relation with the literary establishment. In her novels, this effort manifests through the usage of anachronistic models of novel writing, which she appropriates in a responsive and active way, producing a singular stylistic result that may be interpreted as an expression of such a conflict and of the marginal position that she occupied in this establishment.