MEMÓRIA, TRAUMA E VIOLÊNCIA NAS OBRAS DE RUBEM FONSECA: UMA ANÁLISE DO AUTORITARISMO E SUAS HERANÇAS NA LITERATURA BRASILEIRA

Abstract

This dissertation offers a critical analysis of the work of Rubem Fonseca through the lenses of memory, trauma, and violence, reflecting on the effects of authoritarianism and its legacies in Brazilian society and literature. The research aims to examine how Fonseca’s narratives articulate historical elements of repression and social inequality, particularly during and after the military regime, revealing a literary discourse marked by institutional and structural violence. The central thesis argues that Fonseca’s fiction not only portrays brutality and social marginalization but also functions as testimony and denunciation of the power structures that perpetuate authoritarianism in Brazil. The literary analysis is grounded in the theoretical contributions of authors such as Michel Foucault, Beatriz Sarlo, Sidnei Chalhoub, Lilia Schwarcz, and Flávio dos Santos Gomes, who provide essential frameworks for understanding historical memory and violence. Fonseca’s short stories are examined in dialogue with historical episodes of torture, racial and social inequality, especially as depicted in Brasil: Nunca Mais (Arns, 2011) and Memórias de uma guerra suja (Guerra, 2012). The methodology includes textual analysis and bibliographic review, emphasizing the relationship between literature and collective memory. The study concludes that Fonseca’s work constructs a poetics of denunciation, in which the social traumas of the military dictatorship and their reverberations are transformed into literary material, producing a sharp critique of Brazil’s authoritarian legacy. In this sense, literature emerges as a space of resistance, confrontation against silence, and recovery of the dignity of victims forgotten by official history. Keywords: Rubem Fonseca; Brazilian literature; memory and trauma; military dictatorship; structural violence.