O frame moral em "A vida invisível de Eurídice Gusmão" através do uso de metáforas de bem-estar

Abstract

Literature and Linguistics are complementary areas of the human sciences, colliding on many issues, from different points of view that foster critical thinking and a deep analysis of contemporary society in all its complexity. This work intends to converge knowledge of these two areas in a linguistic analysis that allows a deeper and more detailed understanding of the morals and motivations of the characters of the novel “The Invisible Life of Eurídice Gusmão”, which permeate social-political, linguistic and literary issues. To this end, Lakoff (2008) and his categories of analysis are used instrumentally to explore the metaphors of well-being in the book, with the aim of understanding how they are constructed in discourse and how this can influence the way they the characters' social roles are structured, as well as understanding the morals that drive the characters' actions in the text. Although we adopt Lakoff's linguistic and mentalist methodology for analysis, literary studies are also present for a socially and linguistically grounded understanding of the subject. To achieve the objective proposed here, we use the Frame analysis, which is a door to understanding how thought is structured in our brain. To comprehend how moral framing works, we need to understand how our brain structures what we understand by morals through the first institution of which we are a part of: the family. It is through this moral frame, which is divided into two models, Nurturing Father and Strict Father ¹ (Lakoff, 2009), that we will try to understand how the author structures the moral frames that guide the characters in the novel. For that, the metaphors of well-being (Lakoff, 2008) are used as a basis for analysis, with the final objective of presenting the two models of family and understanding how, possibly, these models affect the characters of the novel, and, being these characters a literary representation of Brazilian citizens and customs, one can also infer how some sectors of Brazilian society apply the morals analyzed here.