A metáfora que mobiliza: uma leitura da crítica “Ciúme e dúvida póstuma [Dom Casmurro, de Machado de Assis]”, de João Cezar de Castro Rocha

Abstract

This research analyses the way of reading presented in the literary criticism “Ciúme e Dúvida Póstuma [Dom Casmurro, de Machado de Assis]”, a text that proposes reading this work through the jealousy. This essay was published for the first time in the section Ideias, of the newspaper Jornal do Brasil, and, later, it was part of the collection Por uma esquizofrenia Produtiva (Da prática à teoria), published in 2015, texts written by literary and cultural critic João Cezar de Castro Rocha. All the essays, except the first, were produced for the cultural sections published in newspaper. Immediately, the way this criticism text develops its analysis caught our attention. Thus, considering our interest to understand this discourse of the criticism and taking the reading as the subject of this dissertation, we ask “How the critic reads the literary work Dom Casmurro in “Ciúme e Dúvida Póstuma”? To answer this question, our journey consisted of three movements: in the first, we developed a detailed analysis of the criticism text in order to outline working process of this way of reading from the jealousy metaphor. After that, we discussed the appearance conditions of the jealousy metaphor. Finally, we discussed the discourses of this way of reading and its effects of sense. The analysis of the jealousy metaphor is developed by the comprehension of the contemporary literary criticism and Michel Pêcheux studies which allow us to take a reading journey for the understanding of the metaphor. From our analysis, we comprehend that the critic’s way of reading through the jealousy metaphor can be comprehended as a reading theory made by two dimensions: the first designed by how the literary text is presented to the reader; the second, that centers upon the reading metaphor, a metaphor which mobilizes the reader to read, therefore, acting like the mediator between the reader and the literary work. This way, we are facing a literary criticism centered in the formation of readers which produces metaphors that will mediate the reading.