On Carolina de Jesus and her itineraries: from Diário de Bitita to Quarto de despejo and the borderlines regarding the permissiveness of the polis

Abstract

It is our interest to investigate the way the composition of the city is delineated through the eyes and discourse of the ‘mineira’ writer whose nomad itineraries shed a light upon the city. Her view goes from Sacramento/MG to São Paulo, one of the biggest cities of Latin America. Through such unsteady route, the writer’s discourse changes its perception about the big urbe; once imagined and dreamed about, it starts to deteriorate as the city shows no intention to accept her within its space as a possible individual. It is understood that the city experienced by Carolina Maria de Jesus, both in her works Quarto de despejo (1960) and Diário de Bitita (1986), gives no access to her nor offers a possibility of dialogue. From this dilemma, we try to rescue the writer’s discourse, having the studies by Roland Barthes in La aventura semiológica (1993) and the considerations by the researcher Regina Dalcantagnè (2003) as major references.