A cidade em atos de memória

Abstract

This dissertation starts from a theme that has been built as a life journey. Two main categories: 1 - the continuous observation of the city and the search for its understanding as, throughout the researcher's life, the territorial map and its concept of city are expanded; 2 – the special look aimed at the elderly, which is strengthened by the researcher's meeting with the main authors of the theoretical work, poets and even fictional authors. From there, a research based on the sum of the two themes listed above was designed, which aimed to build answers to the following intertwined questions of the research: How practices and daily life of different “physiognomists”/“ordinary practitioners” of the city are inserted and relate to the city and its memory? How does the city appear in the narratives and how do such narratives gain strength to educate the city itself? To answer these questions, there was not only a single methodological procedure. There is, within the thesis, empirical production based on free interviews carried out with four of the narrating voices participating in the text, namely: Geralda Caetano da Silva, Mounira Haddad Rahme, Leila Maria Fonseca Barbosa and Thereza de Azevedo Leite and two other distinct processes. The interpretative listening of the voice of Cora Coralina through her writings appears here as a fifth, provocative voice, just like the poet from Goiás who wrote a lifetime and had her first book published only at the age of 75, at the twilight moment of her life. For Jorge Couri – the sixth narrator voice and the only male one – the process used was the analysis of previously carried out interviews combined with the reading of the imagery narrative built with the thousands of photographs he produced in almost half a century of work as a photojournalist in the city of Juiz de Fora. Except for Cora Coralina, the other five narrators spent at least more than ninety percent of their lives in the city of Juiz de Fora and, for them, the city narrated and the city that educates is this. The research is based, theoretically, on a list of authors from the field of Memory and the theory of History, with emphasis on Walter Benjamin and Ecléa Bosi who, more than theoretical references, are sources of inspiration for the entire construction of the work in its form. and content. The research process, from the beginning, understood the answer to a first central and subterranean question: do narratives educate? Yes, narratives educate! However, it was decided to return to this questioning to reinforce what seems clear to those who enters on thinking about Social Memory. And it answers the question chosen as a guide for this research, confirming, through academic procedures, that the narratives of long-lived people and, by extension, the narratives of all living beings have educational force for the understanding of the city as a space of varied coexistences and simultaneous experiences. in different territories, considering that it is also confirmed that the city is not one but multiple, plural and polyphonic. It has several skins and layers and shelter many temporalities and, in the specific case of Juiz de Fora, the different lives of almost six hundred thousand people.