OS SLAMS POÉTICOS E SUAS CAPACIDADES DE DESENVOLVEREM ASCONSCIÊNCIAS INDIVIDUAIS

Abstract

This thesis analyzes Poetry Slam's aesthetic expressions and their implication for the individual consciousness of the artists who produce them. It takes a historical-dialecticalmaterialist epistemic and methodological approach and engages critical concepts from socio-historical psychology theory. It draws on the theoretical and methodological elaborations of Vigotski (1991, 1993, 1995, 1996, 1999a, 1999b, 1999c, 2010, s/a) to study the psychology of art. The driving hypothesizes of this work is that participation in poetry slams is an activity that mediates the relationship between the subject and reality, with the potential to unveil to spoken word artists significant social contractions, expanding their consciousness. This thesis aims to examine the aesthetic expressions of poetry slam and their experiential impact upon the artist's consciousness. Moreover, it raises a discussion around the cathartic function of poetry slam as a creative-artistic practice by historically contextualizing this art form and examining the aesthetic processes artists partake. This research uses qualitative methods, including discourse analysis, and bibliographical research, to frame questions around social and psychic aspects and dynamics that propel critical shifts in the artist's consciousness. It focuses on the discourse analysis of one artist's work, a member of a poetry slam collective in Campo Grande-Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil. The analyses employ the Graphical Discourse Analysis built by Lane (1989a, 1989b) and Leão (1996, 1999, 2007, 2016) to explore the dynamics of consciousness. The choice for this method assumes that the analysis of individual consciousness is possible by looking at the semiotic elements that structure the consciousness. Such elements belong to the domain of meanings and senses that constitute the subject's discourses which can reveal how the artists express their movements of thought and other higher psychological functions through their use of language. This thesis concludes that an analysis of the individual consciousness of the artist demonstrates that the possibility of having his personal experiences heard by other subjects and valued by a social group is the motive that keeps the activity. When mediated by the aesthetic experience, the activity promotes qualitative changes in subjectivity and transforms the identity of its participants. However, even though we see an enrichment and expansion of identity appear as a psychic effect resulting from this activity, this thesis argues the artistic language of the Poetry slam reproduces ideological values of the hegemonic classes in some of its dynamics of expressions. Such reproduction reifies these values in the artist's consciousness, thus hindering the subject from understanding the contradictions of the activity he performs.

Keywords: Consciousness. Psychology of Art. Poetry slam.