Cerzido invisível: enunciação editorial e materialidades dos fotolivros Rua e Paranoia

Abstract

If literature is understood as a symbolic system (CANDIDO, 2023), then it depends equally on the literary producers, the reading public, and the material means that make this communication possible. In other words, literary works are not the texts imagined by the authors, but the way in which this creation reaches the readers, a materiality that reveals, with more or less emphasis, the historical, social, technological and political conditions available at the time of its production. Therefore, this research has tried to show how these conditions are revealed in two similar and contemporary works: Rua (1961), by Guilherme de Almeida and Eduardo Ayrosa, and Paranoia (1963), by Roberto Piva and Wesley Duke Lee, two books of poetry and photographs that deal with the city of São Paulo. To this end, the two works were observed through four denominators: i) the author of the poems and his position in the Brazilian literary tradition; ii) the author of the photographic images; iii) the publisher and his position in the historical panorama of the São Paulo publishing market; iv) the book that resulted from these relationships. The observation of these cases together forms what Emmanuël Souchier (1998; 2007) postulated as “editorial enunciation”, one of the theories that underpinned this research, in addition to authors from critical bibliography and the history of written culture, such as Roger Chartier (2007; 2014) and D. F. Mackenzie (2018); the history of the Brazilian publishing industry by Laurence Hallewell (2012) and Cilza Carla Bignotto (2018); and the contextualization of the history of Brazilian culture and literature by Antonio Candido (1989; 2006; 2023). More specifically, given the nature of the works analyzed, authors such as Roland Barthes (2022), Susan Sontag (2004), and John Berger (2013) substantiate the comments on photography, as well as Natalia Brizuela’s (2014) research and conclusions on photography in the context of contemporary Latin American art. Finally, Antoine Compagnon (2014), Néstor Canclini (2015), and Marshall Berman (2007) lead the discussion on how modernity and modernism are reflected in the two works.