Journal | Annali di Ca’ Foscari. Serie occidentale
Journal issue | 52 | 2018
Research Article | As ‘vidas’ de Jorge de Lima
As ‘vidas’ de Jorge de Lima
Abstract
The Brazilian poet Jorge Lima, better known for his relation with surrealist aesthetics and popular culture, wrote several lives of saints that depart from the Brazilian modernist context. Although Catholicism is sometimes manifest in his poetic works, these ‘lives’ constitute a point of antagonism for their informative prose and for their selective restrictions on images. By their supposed imitation of divinity and their abandonment of the self, the texts Anchieta, Dom Vital and A vida extraordinária de Santo Antônioare related both to the Spanish mysticism of San Juan de la Cruz, and to the Christian rhetoric of the sermo humilis as deployed by Jesuit colonial authors. The article aims to investigate some parallels between previous hagiographies and Lima’s texts as well as to demonstrate how these modernist ‘lives’ inevitably fail in their attempt to manifest their humble vocabulary and imagery, performing a paradoxical auto-hagiography.
Submitted: March 31, 2018 | Published Sept. 28, 2018 | Language: pt
Keywords Autobiography • Lives • Hagiography • Jorge de Lima • Modernism
Copyright © 2018 Leonardo D'Avila de Oliveira. This is an open-access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction is permitted, provided that the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. The license allows for commercial use. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
Permalink http://doi.org/10.30687/AnnOc/2499-1562/2018/01/009
