Aluísio Azevedo, lecteur d'Emile Zola : Une étude sur les représentations de la ville dans Casa de Pensão et Pot-Bouille

摘要

Naturalism has been stereotyped and understudied in Brazil, and so have the relationships between Brazilian Naturalism and the European models that originated it. This thesis aims at shedding light on the relationships between Emile Zola and Aluisio Azevedo through the analysis of the representations of the city in the novels Casa de Pensão and Pot-Bouille. Parallelism and divergence between the two literary pieces will be presented. To this end, this study employs thematic criticism based on Walter Benjamin's categories in order to describe the urban imagery found in Azevedo's Casa de Pensão and Zola's Pot-Bouille, an imagery characterized by an opposition to modernity and the city. Also, both novels are inspired by the strong belief that the urban topos generates peculiar types of subjectivity. Hence, the collective habitations in focus – i.e., the immeuble disseminated by Baron Haussmann's urban reforms and the boardinghouses in Rio de Janeiro – would engender certain ways of being, acting and thinking in their dwellers. Such anthropological demarché translates as a sort of negative pedagogy, which displays an inappropriate educational process and points out its spurious results, thus implicitly or explicitly advancing an alternative educational model. It is here concluded that the pedagogical and topological approach implemented in Pot-Bouille appears in Casa de Pensão as a study of the national ailments, which is in turn demonstrated through the analysis of various models of subjectivity formation at specific loci of the city of Rio de Janeiro, namely the modest Portuguese two-storey houses and the typical boarding houses.