A estética da existência nos romances de formação: o personagem Zezé, de José Mauro de Vasconcelos.

Abstract

The work aims to show the integration between Michel Foucault's concept, Existence’s Aesthetics, and formation novels, also called Bildungsroman. We take the concept of existence aesthetics, understood as a beautiful way of building one's own life, to compose and integrate the concept of formation novel, which are novels that describe and relate life course of a character. The main theoretical reference of the research is Michel Foucault, embraced with some theorists who discuss their themes, as well as authors who theorize about formation novels, such as ARAUJO & RIBEIRO (2012), BAKTHIN (2011), MAAS (2000) and VOLOBUEF (1999). Foucault evolves to the existence aesthetics term starting from self-care and self-techniques, which are a way of being and conducting oneself. Conduction and construction of being are reflected on habits, the way of behaving and the way of looking at life, which must be beautiful - from this, Foucault explicit the life as a work of art, and calls it Existence Aesthetics. The characteristics of this beautiful life, such as the transformation of the individual and autonomous construction of his own life, through mediation of masters, are explicit in formation novels. We present José Mauro de Vasconcelos’s autobiographical works - Doidão (1963), My Sweet Orange Tree (1968) and Let's Warm the Sun (1974), as a set of books featuring the formation novel, where Zezé’s story and his training course is related, we analyze the narrative of the protagonist 's life as reports of his formation and as proof of the integration of the themes approached. We conclude that beautiful way of life, that is, the existence aesthetics, is included in formation novels, with the presence of friendship and parrhesía, contributing to an additional way of thinking about human formation and bringing to the contemporary world new thinking possibilities. In Education, research on human formation is constant and necessary, conducts to new possibilities of thought, so that the individual is brave and autonomous enough to build his own way of life and to form himself completely, or, in nowadays days, the closest to it.