As palavras fantásticas delas: registro crítico historiográfico da literatura fantástica de autoria feminina de Mato Grosso do Sul

Abstract

This research aims to establish a historical and critical record of the artistic-literary production by female authors from Mato Grosso do Sul, especially what is understood as fantastic literary narrative. This analysis stems from a proposal that approaches the field of Women's History, from the perspective of intersectional feminism. As part of the methodology, through bibliographic research, a review of works and research on feminism, literary production and the retrieval of literature by female authors, fantastic literature theories, and literature from Mato Grosso do Sul was carried out to understand the nuances of the discussion about the erasure of these literatures and productions. The research aligns with works that seek to highlight the national fantastic and is justified by the unprecedented nature of the record in Mato Grosso do Sul. Therefore, the period considered was from the creation of the State, dated 1977, up to the present moment; for the analysis of the corpus, data collection was carried out between June 2021 and May 2024, considering authors and publications found up to the latter date. Considering the discussion about the different possible theoretical approaches to the fantastic, from its characterization (genre, aesthetic category, or narrative mode) to the nuances of historical and reflexive influences on the construction of the fantastic literary tradition (such as the European fantastic, the Latin American marvelous realism, and the African animistic realism), the fantastic was established, as a referential definition, as a broad mode of narrative construction, which does not occur through exclusive, defined, and definitive means; however, the definition was refined to observe narratives that bring about the rupture with intradiegetic reality, intrinsically linked to verisimilitude with the reality external to the work; where the fantastic element can be supernatural, or transgressive of reality, inexplicable, unsettling, strange, or unusual; and begins to exist from and through language, because, otherwise, its existence is neither explained nor possible. In this way, a critical reading of the works was performed, selecting as the scope the production in the short story format, with the aim of scrutinizing three points: the construction of the narrative in relation to the fantastic element; the relational aspects of the work with the historical and social context in which the writer is inserted; and the representation of women (when applicable). The research aims to understand how the construction of the fantastic imaginary of the writers from Mato Grosso do Sul occurs, which, in turn, allows us to observe how they represent their perceptions of existence, making it inseparable to perceive and discuss some aspects related to their form, content, and context.