Description
The aim of this work is to analyse the imaginary formation of João Cabral de Melo Neto in The Death and Life of a Severino in order to verify the usual discourse that he is the poet of reason, reinforced not only by critics and scholars of his work, but even by the writer himself
in various interviews. To achieve so, we use some concepts of the French Discourse Analysis, namely, discourse, interdiscourse, discursive formation, ideological formation and imaginary
formation, which we discuss with abundant explanations and apply to three parts of the drama-poem The Death and Life of a Severino: a Pernambuco Christmas play by comparing between an irrationalist ideological formation and a rationalist ideological formation. It was
also necessary to explain the meaning of the term reason in philosophy, which is not homogeneous; however, we have to take it from a rationalist discursive formation, i.e., like a platonic idea, for, only this way the discourse João Cabral is the poet of reason could make sense. From that perspective, antidiscursive at first, we verify the plausibility of the said imaginary formation of the Pernambucan poet; otherwise, we would have to analyse the discourse reason is a universal , more distant from a relation to literary discourse and the
poet. Based on the theory and methodological procedure of Discourse Analysis, our conclusion goes against a thinking tradition, for the existing discourses in the most famous work of that artist reveal the interpellation from irrationalist discursive formations. Besides
these aspects, we make a comparison between philology and Discourse Analysis and we demonstrate the reflections of each in the reading of discursive sequences; we still present some contributions that Discourse Analysis can offer as a new literary criticism.
