Topic organization and aesthetics and stylistics effects in letters about Sertões do Seridó

Abstract

This work takes as its object of study a specific set of texts, designated letters about Sertões do Seridó (a region in Rio Grande do Norte state, in the northeast of Brazil), written by Paulo Bezerra, whose main approach is the backcountry universe. For its unique character, mainly because of a strong poetic appeal, we infer that these letters can also contain natural phenomena related to discourse compositional structure, which may be responsible for creating specific effects, particularly aesthetical. In order to discuss the issue, we set the theoretical assumptions of Textual-Interactive Perspective, whose base is the concept of language as interaction, such as verbal activity impregnated with the space-time social and historical context in which the interlocutors are related, we chose the analytical category discursive topic and analyse introduction, sequencing and change of topic mechanisms. The goal is to determine the functionality of these mechanisms, noting how correlate the structural and interactional aspects are, and how this movement can be used to explain some of the aesthetic and stylistic effects of these letters. The result shows that different topic organizational patterns are used, according to the nature of the central topic. These different mechanisms express an aesthetic intention and feature a style. This result gives rise to more general conclusions about the texts: their discursive-compositional structure is related to the creation of aesthetics and stylistics effects.

Keywords: discursive topic, letters, textual-interactive analysis, stylistic effects.