O amor nos tempos de Lygia: da obsessão à reflexão

Abstract

This work brings in its corpus two short stories by the writer Lygia Fagundes Telles analyzed from the perspective of the inseparable elements of the speech genre determined by the Russian thinker Mikhail Bakhtin (2010): thematic content, compositional construction and style. Such aspects, according to the author, cannot and should not be analyzed separately, because these three elements are indissolubly merged into the whole of the utterance, being denominated as discourse genre. In addition, the research shows that the short story genre not only has some specificities commented by the argentine critic Júlio Cortázar (2006), but also elements that are part of a narrative. Constituents such as character, time, space are brought to light in the theoretical foundation of Todorov (2013), Tomachevski (2013) and Wood (2012) bringing in the work How fiction works explanations about the fictional genre, the short story being one of these textual types that fits into fiction. The short stories are analyzed from the perspective of love, having as a theoretical basis the work Fragments of a love speech, by Roland Barthes (1988), which points out how a subject in love can think, act, feel, desire the other. In this sense, the central figures of the short stories “Pomba Enamorada ou Uma História de Amor” (1977) and “A Confissão de Leontina” (1991) bring in their plots female characters who live this love in different measures respectively. The first exerts a passionate love that can be understood as obsessive, since she exaggerates in demonstrating this feeling towards her loved one, thus allowing her life to be a whirlwind of events. The second, distributes a contained love that can be seen as reflective, since it exposes the reasons for this feeling attributed to his cousin. Offering him all sorts of dedication that she made him judge. That love, however, led her down a path that would possibly be irreversible. This work can serve as a theoretical-critical path for the analysis of other short stories.