Metáforas da melancolia na ficcionalização romanesca de Nicole Krauss

Abstract

This thesis aims to analyze two narratives written by Nicole Krauss, “Swimming Holes” present in the novel Great House (2012), and Forest Dark (2018), in order to discuss the metaphorical resources present in the narratives in their approaches to the theme of melancholy. Melancholy is the subject of the essay “Mourning and Melancholia”, published in 1917 by Sigmund Freud, where he proposes that melancholy is a reaction to object loss, although the melancholic self identifies with what it has lost. And it is in this process of identification with the lost object that literature uses metaphor as a way to present a new meaning for melancholy. Considering the feeling of loss, which is a constant for the melancholic, Krauss creates images that give new meaning to the lost object: the metaphors of the hole, which represents a world emptied of meaning, and the hotel, which signifies creative inhibition. For the theoretical discussion of melancholia, Freud’s essay “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917/2010a) and its commentators are used as a theoretical basis to understand how the melancholic subject deals with situations of loss. Thus, it is concluded that, in Nicole Krauss’s narratives, melancholia is characterized as a psychological reaction of the protagonists to the experience of loss and a feeling of emptiness, and that the author's literary strategy is to configure it as metaphors. As a method, this thesis emphasizes Freud's theory of melancholia, as well as other studies by Freud on trauma, inhibition, and the unheimlich and their relationship to melancholia. Thus, both Freud’s theory of melancholia and other related developments are used to analyze Nicole Krauss's approach to this theme and her process of creating metaphors.