O Cordel e suas marcas, na literatura e na cultura brasileiras: uma análise da obra morte e vida Severina, de João Cabral de Melo Neto

Abstract

This work aims to demonstrate the importance of cordel literature as a Brazilian aesthetic-cultural experience, highlighting its role in the diffusion and preservation of collective memory, orality and diverse forms of popular traditions. The work of João Cabral de Melo Neto, Morte e vida Severina is brought here to the center of discussion, since its aesthetic complexity allows us to insert it in different forms and semiotic systems, including literature, popular culture, performative orality, music, theatre, visual arts and audiovisual. In this sense, the analytical path here investigates how the relationship between the cordel and other contemporary manifestations such as rap, the battles of rappers, as a kind of resumption of repentes in which popular singers compete, becoming an essential axis of this study. These expressions, based on writing practices and other cultural manifestations with roots in orality, performance and the search for a discourse filled with social criticism that can be observed and verified its power in the light of theories such as those of Luís da Câmara Cascudo, Haroldo de Campos, Antônio Candido, Darcy Ribeiro and others. The choice of the theme is also justified by the scarcity of systematic critical fortune on the cord and by the preservation challenges arising from its material support, often ephemeral.