A representação da violência como resultado da miséria em “Feliz Ano Novo”, de Rubem Fonseca, à luz da Linguística Sistêmico-Funcional

Abstract

For Halliday (1982), anti-language is what characterizes an anti-society, and may be a form of resistance by marginalized groups in the face of a dominant language/force. Linking this concept to a lexicon-grammatical analysis, we seek to analyze the way in which violence, the result of poverty, is represented in the short story “Feliz ano novo”, by Rubem Fonseca (2012). The research is based on the assumptions of Systemic-Functional Linguistics, by Halliday (1989) and Halliday and Matthiessen (2014). In addition, it will be based on Hasan’s (1989) model of verbal art and language, to link the practice of linguistic analysis to a literary object. The nature of the research is of an interpretive qualitative nature, as it will use the transitivity system of the ideational metafunction – which conceives clause as representation – to carry out the analysis of the corpus. The results point to the predominance of material and relational processes that indicate actions and attributes of the group. At the same time, four revealing categories of anti-language used by the characters were identified, distributed: (1) psychological/mental nature (PSA); (2) carnal/sexual nature (CA); (3) physical/material nature (PHA); (4) eschatological nature (EA). Thus, the violence represented in the story is part of the characters’ attempt to reverse their social fragility, while, at the same time, they can keep the group’s identity and the counter-reality they experience intact.