Name: WEVERSON DADALTO
Publication date: 03/08/2023
Examining board:
Name |
Role |
|---|---|
| FABIOLA SIMAO PADILHA TREFZGER | Presidente |
| JAIME GINZBURG | Examinador Externo |
| MARIA ZILDA CURY | Examinador Externo |
| NELSON MARTINELLI FILHO | Examinador Interno |
| WILBERTH CLAYTHON FERREIRA SALGUEIRO | Examinador Interno |
Summary: The collection of Bernardo Kucinski's work witnesses the military regime authoritarianism (1964-1985) as a paradigmatic manifestation of the barbarism that persists in Brazilian society, a society that has been founded and sustained by violence. This study proposes an analysis of the novels and short stories of the author while it suggests the association between the horror of dictatorship and the widespread catastrophes in the modern world, which cannot be dissociated from dehumanizing political-economic orders and which have been pushed to the extreme in the unspeakable terror of the Holocaust. From the 1970s onwards, Kucinski produced a vast non-literary bibliography devoted primarily to reporting state crimes, politics, economics, and journalism. This research introduces the most representative books of this phase, which provide theoretical, critical and historiographical elements to examine his later literature. Kucinski debuts in fiction by publishing the serial Mataram o presidente (2010). His major novel, K. (2011), is the subject of notable critical studies. Until the release of O congresso dos desaparecidos (2023), the writer's intense dedication to literary activity results in the publication of twelve works. Throughout this dissertation, comments are made to each of these fictional works, identifying the main marks of the collection and highlighting aspects related to the testimony of repression victims. Afterwards, such interpretations refer to the theoretical discussion on the unstable delimitations of violence and authoritarianism concepts. Certain propositions contribute to the debate, such as the ones of Walter Benjamin, along with investigations of philosophers who differently or even divergently seek to understand these problems; among which Hannah Arendt, Jacques Derrida, Giorgio Agamben, Slavoj Žižek, Byung-Chul Han, Judith Butler and Theodor Adorno stand out. The contributions of these thinkers are brought to the particular analysis of the selected fictional works. Analyzed texts show that Kucinski defies forgetting both the unspeakable effects of Nazi totalitarianism and the intense anti-Semitism in Poland at the time of World War II. These works present the inexpressible suffering of survivors of the catastrophe from the perspective of Jewish immigrant refugees in Brazil. The understanding of this face of Kucinski’s production establishes theoretical and historiographical foundations in the research of Paul Ricoeur, Marianne Hirsch, Nachman Falbel and Regina Igel, among others. Finally, this thesis seeks to demonstrate that, by relating the dictatorship in Brazil to other violent events, Kucinski's writing takes a sympathetic stand regarding the testimony of the victims and denounces the continuity of authoritarianism in supposedly democratic periods. The need to elaborate on memory and the impossibility of representing traumatic experiences through conventional languages demand the overcoming of traditional narrative forms and the thematization of ethical and aesthetic impasses faced by the witness. In this sense, studies by literary critics such as Márcio Seligmann-Silva and Jaime Ginzburg are pertinent to the interpretation of Kucinskian fiction. The politically compromised reception of Kucinski's testimonial literature mobilizes literary studies to participate in the elaboration of the past and to resist the authoritarianism that persists in contemporary times.
