Literatura, paisagem e experiência: deslocamentos e estranhamentos a partir da escrita de José J. Veiga

Abstract

Literature plays a fundamental role in shaping the lenses through which we view life. Through literature, it’s possible to experience other perspectives through the characters in books and expand the repertoire of imaginable worlds beyond those we know. On the other side, we find the writer. Immersed in an interweaving of reality and fiction, the writer can transpose into his narratives what affects him in his daily life and the questions that move him. In defense of a literature we understand as powerful, this work aims to map the inflections perceived in the leap between the collections “Os Cavalinhos de Platiplanto” (1959) and “A estranha máquina extraviada” (1967), by the writer from Goiás, José J. Veiga (1915-1999), regarding the themes of the stories and the shifts in the author’s life. Here, we understand these changes as “narrative shifts,” which motivated the choice of these two works as the focus of this research, given the profound sociopolitical, urban, and economic context of Brazil, which also entailed estrangements from Veiga’s personal life. At the threshold of the theoretical fields of architecture and literature, we use an experimental methodological approach that draws on clues revealed throughout the research, leading to deviations, and which continues to be developed as part of the research. The dissertation is structured in three chapters: the first provides a brief overview of the relationships between experience, narrative, and landscape, drawing on parallels with literature; the second addresses Brazil’s urban and sociopolitical transformations; and, finally, the third encompasses José J. Veiga’s geographic and conceptual shifts based on the idea of estrangement proposed in this research, in addition to the cartographies produced in this analysis.