Dos "cadernos de lugar comum" aos "repositórios de frases": práticas de leitura e escrita em notas de Rui Barbosa e Florestan Fernandes

Abstract

Since the invention of writing several techniques were created related to it and also reading. One of these was metaphorically described by Seneca in his Epistles. According to this philosopher’s understanding, reading and writing can be compared to the “bees”’ work, which collect pollen, from flower to flower, to make honey. Similarly to the bees’ pollen collecting, readers read and select the best texts and posteriorly the best phrases from such texts, gathering and regrouping them into notebooks. Thus, having their readings’ best “material” at hand, those readers could make the good quality “final product”, as their own written texts or oral speeches. In the long term, many were the subjects of different cultures that dedicated themselves to this task of establishing procedures and guidelines, as well as using these procedures related to text reading and phrase collection aiming to produce other texts, oral or written, for distinct purposes, being those texts either from the same genre and field of those where phrases were collected, or very distinct. In this thesis, we dedicate ourselves to analyze and describe some specificities in the appropriation of this reading and writing technique, by relevant brazilian intellectuals, from the second half of 19th century and first half of 20th century, namely, the jurist Rui Barbosa and sociologist Florestan Fernandes, as evidenced in their “notebooks”. To compose our notes corpus from these two intellectuals, we resorted to the collections “Fundação Casa de Rui Barbosa” and “Fundo Florestan Fernandes”, which get together documents, works and objects from these intellectuals. We selected, from their collections, 3 (three) notebooks from each author, all classified and available in the “produção intelectual” series. For that material’s analysis, we lean on Discourse Analysis and Cultural History’s principles and concepts. As any other cultural object, these notebooks point to discourses and representations that are in their production’s origin and determination of existence's cultural conditions. Rui Barbosa and Florestan Fernandes are subjects from a time-space and consequently are subject to the discourses and representations shared with their contemporaries. Those representations have a history, are socially and culturally determined by what the subjects know, believe, enunciate and practice. The way they read, select phrases, preserve them, collect and classify them, how they write their texts and constitute their works is greatly due to discourses and representations about what is reading, writing, what is to be an intellectual, writer, author in their time and in our society. Because of this reason, in spite of the similarities they present, these intellectuals differ in the technique’s usage and the ends and usages in their end-texts. One essential difference between them lies in the support given by themselves to those annotations: Rui Barbosa prefers loose pages; Florestan Fernandes the notebooks. Also, we observed that Rui Barbosa is “less organized”, more speculative, more literary in his phrase selection and how these are collected; Florestan Fernandes is “more organized”, more systematic, more didactic with this legacy.