Style, passion and tensivity

two jealousy cases

Abstract

Our attention is focused on passions arising from the lack of confidence from an individual in relation to another one, like jealousy. The fiduciary disturbance, in this case, relates to a peculiar form of world representation. But, in fact, people can become jealous, restless, suspicious, disappointed, and so on, in a variety of styles. If the discursive totalities put into confrontation are considered, so that one can infer the image of the presupposed enunciator, or his style of being passionate, one can then uncover the different ways of presence from an accurate examination of the construction mechanisms involved in the referred passional effects. We illustrate these questions through a comparative analysis between two styles of being jealous in Brazilian literature: that of Paulo Honório, protagonist of the novel São Bernardo, by Graciliano Ramos, and that of Bentinho, from the novel Dom Casmurro, by Machado de Assis. The interest of such an approach lies in explaining how the enunciation actor, as an affection subject, may be recovered by theoretical and methodological principles which move away from any psychologism and place the text where it came from: the discourse.