Identidades e representações do Nordeste na literatura de cordel

Abstract

As it was in Portugal few centuries before, with the jograls (singers) of trovadorism (Galician- Portuguese Lyrics) singing around the towns and interpreting Cantigas (the lyrics), later in Brazil, the walking singers of Cordel used to write and spread out their pieces at squares and little villages in the Northeast of Brazil. It came out then a kind of country-side production essentially poetic named Cordel literature. It was able to join socio-historic-cultural values and constitute itself as a movement carrying the identity and representation of the people of sertao (draught region in the northeast of Brazil). This study aims to identify through analysis of discursive practices (cordeis), how man, life and Northeast of Brazil values are produced and represented as well as are the voices and the interdiscourses that constitute those representations. In order to do so it was constituted a corpus with thirty five texts of different Cordelistas (writers of Cordel) and from distinct period (from 1900 to 1980). Discursive sequences taken from these texts are examined according to French discourse analysis methods, notably, using theoretical references from Bakhtin (1995) and Pecheu (1995), accordingly to whom discourses are the same, but as echoes from other voices which repeat themselves in different epoch, conditions and places. These constructs put together some fundamental principles of Cultural Studies, specially concerning to the identity questions. The study is organized in two chapters. In the first, Do Nordeste ao Cordel, it is described the elements which compose the condition of the production of Cordel such as the draught, the cangaco (“social banditry”), the religiosity, and the social aspects of the sertao people. Beside that in this chapter, the most important authors and the characteristics of the literatures such as language and themes are explored. In the second chapter, Sujeitos, (Inter)discursos e sentidos em folhetos de Cordel, are the analysis of ten texts from which, history and discursive formation, emerges the strong traces of the identity and the ideology of the sertanejo (people from sertao). Finally, after the analysis of two recent texts and the comparison of them to older ones, it is highlighted the important differences between them, arriving to traces of the process of (des)identification of the production more recent in relation to the ideology of the sertanejo community under the influence of globalization.