Imaginário impresso e caracteres culturais: Uma análise das narrativas do suplemento literário correio das artes na década de 1940

Abstract

This work aims to analyze how the imaginary was built in the narratives of Correio das Artes, literary supplement to Paraíba’s newspaper A União. Being sixty-five years old, the supplement to A União, in addition to being considered an important documental, historiographical record in the state of Paraíba, is Brazil’s oldest literary supplement still published. Thus, this study analyzed how social imaginary in João Pessoa conditioned and influenced the elaboration of that journalistic production and how Correio das Artes, in return, contributed for the development of the social imaginary in the capital of Paraíba. This research aimed, in the everydayness that traverses the supplement, to understand how the structuring of everyday life in João Pessoa occurred. In this way, we noted how the imaginary emerged in those narratives and how the supplement was the momentum for that overview of the city. The narratives utilized as a corpus in this research date from the 1940s. That decade has forty numbers, from which we analyzed twelve narratives. The choice for that period is justified by the fact that decade is inserted in the most important cycle of the supplement. Aside from those narratives, we interviewed ten people among today’s poets, writers, former editors and professors that had their texts published on the supplement, so as to show, through their impressions, how that 65-year-constructed imaginary still continues to produce images. The narratives were collected in a qualitative way. Myth criticism was the technique deployed for identifying how the imaginary about the city and the supplement manifests itself in those narratives. That technique aims to grasp, from cultural manifestations in a given society, what myths are behind those productions. The phenomenological approach is adopted in this master thesis. The research is of a documental-descriptive kind. As a theoretical ground, we adopted Gilbert Durand’s General Theory of Imaginary. For him, the imaginary is the set of images and image relations that constitute the thinking capital of Homo sapiens. In this way, besides bringing information or descriptions of everyday art practices in the city of João Pessoa, the narratives of that supplement operate as mythical, sensitive manifestations of the imaginary world.