Long live my master

Machado and his ginga

Abstract

This article analyzed Machado de Assis’s short story “ Teoria do Medalhão,” exploring language as a discursive arena, reflecting on the complexity of Machado de Assis’s literary creation. The notion of “literaginga” acts as an instance of movement, aesthetics, and writing, as it allows for a change in perspective on the idea presented here. In the story, the author constructs his text as a game of capoeira, where orality and literary performance intertwine. As a methodology, the short story was examined using the characteristics of “literaginga”: semantic configuration in orality, embodied and aesthetic movements, “mandinga,” and cadence. It seeks to point out that the story presents orality, using colloquialisms and verbal choices that evoke the cadence of the capoeira game. The analysis highlights the cadence of the text, evidenced by verbal rhythm, capoeira songs, and contrasting constructions that bring the narrative to life. The story reveals a unique aesthetic approach, rooted in Negre-Brazilian culture and the peripheral experience. The central objective was to analyze the short story “Teoria do Medalhão” from the selected work to compose the corpus in order to verify the functionality of the “literaginga” analysis category, presenting the performative content in the author’s literary fabric, approaching ancestral knowledge with his texts. Furthermore, the efficiency of the analysis category developed by me, “literaginga,” was sought to be rectified. To promote the study of performance by approaching it with literature, the field of performance studies was relied upon.