Rastros das socialidades: conversações com João Gilberto Noll e Luiz Ruffato

Abstract

Facing the uncertainties that contemporarily permeate the Social Sciences, our gaze upon the world steps on uncertain and unwarranted human soil. Daring to see through our own lenses, it is inevitable to question the conceptual and methodological tracks that guide us through this path. Therefore, the aim of this thesis is to understand and interpret traces of socialities in literary writings. That is, starting from literary texts, to follow the trajectories of alterities present in social relations that mark society. The hypothesis presented here is that the traces of socialities are present in these contemporary literary narratives, and that under a confluence of literary genres and forms, there are quests to express particular social experiences. In the restless work of literature, lies one of the paths to an archeology of this era of uncertainty – a support, even tough ephemeral, in face of a world that we have not yet learned how to look upon. Through an archeological view of knowledge, this work puts in dialogue the knowledges of social sciences and literature, aiming to understand the movements of social life or the narratives that express the outlines of these socialities. I base myself in the approaches of the archeology of knowledge, so dear to Michel Foucault, fictional ethnography, the Michel Maffesoli’s conceptions about contemporary sociality, and the reflections on narratives and literary writings, in order to outline the readings about aspects that marks the today’s social life in the texts of the brazilian writers João Gilberto Noll (Porto Alegre-RS) and Luiz Ruffato (Cataguases-MG). Therefore, in a possible “fictional ethnography”, I try to show that these literary texts raise the struggles of contemporary social experience. Through them, the multiple voices of counterpoint alterities become present in a crossing of temporalities, nomadisms, in the marks of a “thin geography of the cities”, in a rage of the body, in the oblivion of the social memory in the arenas of alterities that emerge in present society. Therefore, in the literary narratives of the contemporary sociality are distinct “dismounts” of the literary writing, filled with nomad, migrant, dislodged viewpoints. “Underminers of form and gaze”, these writings may follow and permeate the struggles of the lived.