This dissertation explores the interactions between the experience of travel and the creation of narrated selves, as posited by Paul Ricoeur, in the fictional and journalistic work of three Lusophone authors: Miguel Sousa Tavares, from Portugal; Bernardo Carvalho, from Brazil; and José Eduardo Agualusa, from Angola. Through the analysis and discussion of their works as both journalists and fiction authors, the impact of historical and linguistic influence of the Portuguese culture on their respective national identities and self-narratives is viewed in a post-colonial context. Each author's work demonstrates a different level of involvement in the conscious creation of narrative representation, which allows the reader to see the author's cultural influences in relation to the Lusophone heritage as well as in relation to their own nation. Sousa Tavares's work in the novel Equador and his article "As ilhas maltratadas" about São Tomé e Príncipe, is analyzed in reference to its connection to the long history of Portuguese travel literature. The second chapter is an analysis of Nove noites, by Brazilian author Bernardo Carvalho, which demonstrates Carvalho's postmodern use of metanarrative to discuss travel's effect on first and third person narratives. In the work of José Eduardo Agualusa, conscious self-construction occurs in the narrator, who at times is a fictionalized version of Agualusa himself, as well as his characters. Chapter three focuses on Agualusa's character Plácido Domingo from a crônica in Fronteiras Perdidas: contos para viajar to his reappearance as a transformed character in Goa in the quasi-fictional travel book Um estranho em Goa. As the dissertation progresses, theoretical works on travel, narrative, and identity construction are utilized to elucidate how these experiences intersect with one another to varying degrees in these works. Frances Bartowksi's Travelers, Immigrants, Inmates provides significant theoretical background for the different types of travelers as well as for the effects of the experience of displacement. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's concepts of the rhizome and deterritorialization help to analyze the different narrative styles of the three authors. Finally, Ken Wilber's integral consciousness model is used to discuss how both internal and external elements are woven into the narrated self. Collectively, this dissertation aims to explore how the self is created in transit, as it travels from one space to another, but also as it attempts to find a sense of meaning within the traveler himself.
Perez, Oscar C.,
"Travel, Consciousness, and Self-Narrative in the Afro-Luso-Brazilian Triangle"
(2011).
Portuguese and Brazilian Studies Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.7301/Z0M32T1T
