Starting off from images and movie song of Motorcycle Diaries, the Brazilian Walter Salles discusses the meaning of the practice of the then young medical student Ernesto Guevara de La Serna and Latin American perspective it raises. The Amazon River is central to these observations, as is the case with the novel The Raft (1881) by Jules Verne and The Stone Raft by José Saramago, published one hundred years later, in addition to Werner Herzog's film Fitscarraldo, the price of a dream. The river crossing is also featured as a theme in Guimarães Rosa's work and sets a discussion of the role of the intellectual, as well as the Atlantic crossings between the colonizer and the colonized. The crossings in theoretical and critical terms are problematized in terms of boundaries and identities. The prospects opened up by the short story "Orientation" (Tutaméia) by Guimarães Rosa, the novel by José Saramago and a symbolic crossing in the Angolan romance Pepetela (A generation of utopia), reverse the positivist outlook of modernity and evade being ossified by postmodernity. Such narratives spawn the discussion of historical, cultural and literary discourses of our times that naturalize the processes of networking and acceptance of asymmetrical cultural flows. In contrast to the habits of the managed society, leading to administration of difference in favor of established hegemonies, they develop the concept of concrete utopia, a youth principle, which is realized in the projects where supranational community horizons are key.
GUIMARÃES ROSA AND LITERATURE AS LIFE Guimarães Rosa’s stories beget a poetic-existential project, which unveils itself in the story “The mirror”, core of the book First stories. In this story
an idea is launched which proposes life as a continuous exertion of creativity, of which depends the conquest of autonomy and the genesis of a self, who brings his existence forth as the author of his own becoming. After presenting the Rosian story and the constellation of poetic concepts it gives rise to, and besides examining the passionate critical operation its reading requires, the present essay assumes the task of interpreting two stories, one from First stories, the other from Tutameia. Third stories ‡ “Darandina “ and “‡ Uai, eu?” ‡ showing the Rosian project in action in two radically distinct situations, which nevertheless retain sufficient similarity to highlight and
embody the primordial idea they proceed from and also to suggest a kinship between first and third stories, associated in what we might name the Rosian pedagogy of existing.