O Bildungsroman contemporâneo: uma análise de Sapato de salto, de Lygia Bojunga, e Sinfonia em branco, de Adriana Lisboa

Abstract

This research investigates the reconfigurations of the female Bildungsroman in contemporary Brazilian literature through the analysis of Sapato de salto (2006), by Lygia Bojunga, and Sinfonia em branco (2013), by Adriana Lisboa — narratives focused on representing the formation of girls and women. It assumes that the Bildungsroman, historically linked to the masculine and bourgeois ideal of subject formation, has undergone successive reformulations in modernity, related to historical and cultural transformations in the ways of understanding the individual and their formative processes. In dialogue with studies on the genre by Cristina Ferreira Pinto (1990), Wilma Patricia Maas (2000), Larissa Warzocha Fernandes Cruvinel (2004; 2009), and Marcus Vinicius Mazzari (2020), the analysis seeks to understand how these works critically update the assumptions of the Bildungsroman and contribute to outlining trends in the contemporary Brazilian female Bildungsroman. The investigation revealed thematic, formal, and ideological recurrences in both works, while also highlighting displacements and tensions that traverse women’s formative processes in contexts marked by different forms of gender oppression. In Sapato de salto, these processes are marked by the marginalization of childhood, patriarchal violence, and relationships of care and solidarity among women, challenging the individualistic and linear ideal characteristic of the genre’s classical model. In Sinfonia em branco, narrative fragmentation, the centrality of memory, and the intertwining of violence and silencing shape trajectories traversed by discontinuity and the persistence of the past in the constitution of the characters. Based on these readings, the research found that, in the works analyzed, female formation is constituted as a field for problematizing the relationships between subject, gender, and social reality, articulating the construction of possible forms of existence in the face of losses, ruptures, and violence that permeate women’s experience. In this sense, the study seeks to contribute to critical reflection on two contemporary Brazilian literary narratives centered on women’s formation, highlighting how they rework the premises of the Bildungsroman.