Banca de DEFESA: CALEB BENJAMIM MENDES BARBOSA

A comedy about sadness: heartbreak, irony and heresy in the novel Glória by Victor Heringer

Key-words: Contemporary Literature; Irony; Heresy; Novel; Form.

The research aims to demonstrate that in "Glória" (2012), a novel by Victor Heringer, there is a dual procedure through which we recognize the possibility of apprehending a characteristic malaise of contemporaneity, while it expresses this not only thematically, but especially through formal literary elements. According to Joel Birman (2014), we can characterize the current malaise as a feeling of emptiness of existence, which in the novel takes shape in what the narrator refers to as "desgosto" (disgust). This malaise is presented in the novel through the formal articulation of a hero marked by tragedy, whose plot action engages with the tradition of comedy. "Glória" narrates the trajectory of the Alencar Costa and Oliveira siblings - comprised of Benjamim, a frustrated artist; Daniel, a successful bureaucrat; and Abel, a rising pastor - a family whose members are fated to die not from accidents or illness, but from "desgosto," an acute and unpredictable melancholy that haunts them from generation to generation. Thus, as a result, it becomes evident that it is through the resizing of the hero, whose world is no longer their measure (LUKACS, 2012), and crossed by inventive irony, that Heringer organizes "desgosto" as a structuring trait of his heroes. With this, he not only problematizes the supposed panaceas that gave horizon to the subject, but also brings into his fold a reflection on the language of the novel as a literary genre. Finally, we observe how Heringer's irony serves as the author's response to one of the main theoretical questions of literature that crossed the critical debate of the 20th century: the crisis of representability. Heringer incorporates this crisis into his mode of expression through formal heresy to fictionally reflect on his time and, above all, the artistic creation of his time.