Discourses of resistance: from paratext to text, or vice versa?

Abstract

This research aims to discuss the strategies used in discourses of resistance that confront the military dictatorship that ruled Brazil from the 1960s to 1980s and whose effects are still present today. These discourses never cease to surface in different spheres through different genres. Among them we find the literary discourse, which mobilizes individual and collective memory through documents and/or reports and is thus understood as one of the discourses that seek to unveil and make known the devastating consequences of the years of lead. Theoretically based on concepts offered by the dialogical perspective of discourse, K: Relato de uma busca [K: A Search Report] (2012) and Os visitantes [The Visitors] (2016), written by journalist and writer Bernardo Kucinski, are analyzed as an articulated discourse sequence, insofar as the latter resumes the former, establishes a polemic interaction between them and makes it possible to find the values in tension that organize the whole sequence and design an outline of a discursive project and of the subject that utters it. For the purpose of this article, we underscore the dialogical relationship that is established between texts and paratexts, one of the strategies of the literary discourse of resistance that, through the establishment of voices, seeks answers to concealed events and to possible ways of making them present through language.