BY A POOR WRITING: WRITTEN CULTURE AND EPISTOLARY TRADITION IN A TWENTIETH-CENTURY PERNAMBUCO
social history of written culture; discursive tradition; historicity; personal letter; inability
The present work aims to investigate and reflect on the practice of writing when dealing with a corpus of past synchrony formed by 51 personal letters written by a couple of letter-writers from Pernambuco during the first half of the 20th century. In particular, this dissertation is dedicated to: (i) the reconstruction of the socio-cultural profile of the writers, derived from the intersection of the couple's memories, recorded through an interview and information gathered from the letters themselves; (ii) the tradition in the writing of personal letters, by observing the structure and themes in the letters written by the young Pernambuco couple; and (iii) the characterization of the level of skill, by investigating the written production of the writers. Under the theoretical-methodological framework of the Social History of Written Culture (Petrucci, 1978, 2003; Martínez, 1988; Castillo Gómez and Sáez, 2016; Castilho Gómez, 2020), in light of the characterization of the writers' hands (Marquilhas, 2000; Santiago, 2012; 2019), and the Discursive Tradition Model (Koch, 1997; Kabatek, 2004, 2006; 2012; Longhin, 2014). The results obtained point to a representative corpus regarding the practice of writing love letters, revealing that the theme of love takes on particular nuances and contributes to the complexity and depth of the emotional experiences between N and Z. Additionally, it observes that structural elements persist over time due to their sociocommunicative function.