THE RESCUE OF “SELF-WRITING” IN ALINA PAIM’S FICTION

Abstract

This article presents some reflections on “self-writing” as a strategy for expanding studies on Alina Paim’s work, a female writer from the state of Sergipe, in Brazil, in order to rescue her leadership role in the fight for women’s rights. It emphasizes the formation of female readers of the protagonists of her first novels. As the focus of this paper, we address the strategies of historiographical rescue proposed by Elódia Xavier and the approaches of “self-writing” proposed by Margareth Rago, highlighting how the female reader characters of Estrada da Liberdade (1944) and of Sol do meio-dia (1961) provide clues to the process of engaged writing in the fight for an egalitarian society. We conclude that analyzes such as this one we are making in this article serve as a reliquary for the rescue that has been carried out regarding Alina Paim’s life, literary legacy and critical fortune. She is one of the Northeastern female writers ostracized by Brazilian Literary Canon and by national literary historiography that deserve to be more known and better studied.