Experiências literárias em mundos possíveis ficcionais e seus desdobramentos geográficos

Abstract

The present work is situated within the field of literary geography, raising reflections on the role and perspective of the reader who, upon engaging with literature through reading, undergoes a process of transformation in their ways of seeing, being, and existing in the world. The research draws on the concepts of the factual world and the fictional possible world to address the plurality of worlds the reader comes into contact with. In seeking to understand the mechanisms that allow for such a visceral relationship with literature, the research engages with concepts such as psychic reality, lived experience (vivência), and experience (experiência) in order to conceptualize a literary lived experience and literary experience. Under the hypothesis that the reader, driven by the affect developed in the act of reading, acts as the active agent enabling the material and symbolic correspondence of fictional elements within the factual world, the work outlines an interdisciplinary conceptual path at the interface between geographic science and psychoanalysis. Methodologically, the research is grounded in the qualitative perspective of the Geography of Listening, an approach that understands the centrality of the word (spoken and written) as a mediator of mnemonic records and spatial sensations. To achieve the study's objectives, a bibliographic survey was conducted along with data collection through an online questionnaire directed at reading clubs, gathering written accounts and photographs of personal collections, culminating in three open interviews that welcomed the depth and spontaneity of participants' subjective memories. Theoretically, the investigation puts into tension the concept of the factual world, conceived as the material space we inhabit, structured by external dynamics and subjectively interpreted through individual psychic dynamics, with the concept of the fictional possible world, defined as an abstract construct generated by aesthetic narrative that, although autonomous, retains bridges of reference and verisimilitude with the real. The study delves into human spatiality through the key concept of the geopsychic place, which inseparably integrates unconscious and terrestrial dynamics, situated at the topological fold in which "the external world invades us and the internal world overflows" (Dias, 2022, p. 65), such that speaking about space simultaneously represents a speaking of the self. To uncover the psychic mechanisms underlying this visceral relationship between the reader and fiction, the study draws on the Freudian notions of psychic reality — the dimension of the unconscious in which material reality and fantasy are indistinguishable, operating through fantasies that function as protective fictions against painful memories — and of Dichtung, the poetic creation through language that grants the imaginary universe a singular truth, revealing the subject as the Dichter of their own psychic reality as they actively reconstruct their memories on the plane of language. Drawing on the thought of Walter Benjamin, the dissertation distinguishes between literary lived experience (Erlebnis), corresponding to the conscious memory tied to the act of reading itself and its practical everyday unfoldings (such as consumption, conversations, or travel), and literary experience (Erfahrung), which resides on the unconscious plane of mnemonic traces and occurs when the literary work touches the reader's psychic reality so deeply that the boundaries of the physical book are surpassed. In contrast to the Cartesian rigidity of extended space, the study adopts Eduardo Marandola Jr.'s (2020) concept of placeness (lugaridade), grounded in the relational emergence that occurs in the "in-between space" of happening, dispensing with the need for prior physical structures to exist. From this perspective, literary placeness constitutes the co-emergence of this relationship between the reader and the settings, characters, and affects of the book, which may come to materialize on the factual plane in the form of literary tourism, tattoos, or spontaneous fan memorials. Through the qualitative analysis of readers' accounts, the study reveals how subjects re-signify symbols from fantasy to process traumas, to inscribe definitive identity marks on the skin, or to mediate their travel experiences and fears. Ultimately, the work plants the conceptual seed of the Literary Geopsychic Place, showing that reading is a spatializing practice capable of permanently altering the ways of seeing, being, existing, and acting within concrete geographic space.