Conclave: uma análise comparativa entre as obras de Roberto Pazzi e Robert Harris

Abstract

The Roman Catholic Church is an institution full of traditions and secret rituals, such as the papal election. The process is carried out in complete isolation and secrecy of the cardinal voting behind the Vatican walls. For this reason, the conclave is a ritual still capable of arousing human curiosity since the events during the voting can only be imagined. Therefore, two contemporary writers, The Italian Roberto Pazzi and the British Robert Harris, wrote homonymous works that imagine and narrate the election of a new pope, presenting the structure of the Catholic Church in the 21st century. Consequently, the research is based on authors who approach Comparative Literature, such as Sandra Nitrini (1997) and Gentil de Faria (2019), Theory of Literature, with the concept of literality of Jonathan Culler (1999), the analysis of narratives, such as the theories of narrative focus and the character of fiction. As a result, with a comparative methodology, in which the works Conclave (2001) and Conclave (2016) will be analyzed, this work intends to show the differences between the two works, analyzing the cultural, social, religious and marketing purposes of each of the works, with emphasis on the visionary aspect of the Italian work and the revealing aspect about the power relations that the British writer evidence in his works. Furthermore, with awareness of the obvious differences between styles and works, this work also seeks to present the influences of Roberto Pazzi's work on Robert Harris's narrative and to show the perceived similarities between the two works, separated by a fifteen-year interval between publications.