José de Alencar and the Historiographical Operation: Borders and Disputes between History and Literature ; José de Alencar e a operação historiográfica: fronteiras e disputas entre história e literatura

Based on Michel de Certeau’s interrogations about the “historiographical operation”, this article examines the ways in which José de Alencar sought to legitimize his way of making the past an object of knowledge. We comprehend, thus, that novelists have also undertaken the task of understanding the past. And in addition to this fact, or underlying it, novelists came to rival the alleged circumscription that historians were establishing. In this sense, we intend to approach how José de Alencar’s writing partook in those strains, which started to be strengthened in the 19th century, turning history into the “other” of literature and literature into the “other” of history. Some clashes between history and literature will be examined, considering that the struggles for boundaries between history and literature are part of the very legitimacy that the writing of history constitutes for itself. Some comparisons will be made between José de Alencar’s writing and that of other novelists, in order to chart disputes and identify the perspective of realizing how literature came to assert itself as the “other” of “history writing”. ; Com base nas interrogações de Michel de Certeau sobre a “operação historiográfica”, este artigo examina os modos pelos quais José de Alencar procurou dar legitimidade ao seu modo de fazer do passado um objeto de conhecimento. Compreende-se, desse modo, que os romancistas assumiram, também, a tarefa de compreender o passado. E, além disso, ou subjacente a isso, passaram a rivalizar com a suposta circunscrição que os historiadores foram estabelecendo. Pretende-se abordar como a escrita de José de Alencar faz parte dessas tensões que ganharam mais força a partir do século XIX, transformando a história no “outro” da literatura, e a literatura no “outro” da história. Serão analisados certos confrontos entre história e literatura, levando-se em consideração que as lutas pelas fronteiras entre ambas fazem parte da própria legitimidade que a escrita da história vai constituindo para si mesma. Serão ...