Recovering love with Rubem Braga's chronicles

Abstract

This work consists in an enterprise to increase the study of the chronicle, through a specific practice of analysis in contrast with the most common approaches to the genre, centralized mainly in theoretical reasons. The article intends, therefore, to examine the memory as a resource which focuses on the theme of love in Rubem Braga's chronicles that display happy experiences and/or wholesome recollections. The analysis is guided by inquiries such as: the peculiarities and the frontiers of the genre concerned to the outstanding prosaical aspects and to the emphasis on lyrical and narrative proceedings; the remarks about love as a theme able to give rise or to avoid a grandiloquent discourse; the weight of romanticist and modernist influences in confessions of love which exploit the theme in a positive way; the depiction of the self in the chronicles as a romantic man or one identified to the new patterns of intimacy; and the role of memory in the face of social configurations in the past and in the present.