For a thinking with the soul: the story of Riobaldo as a gesture of thinking-feeling

Abstract

This essay approximates the “thinking-feeling” of Rosa's prose, demonstrated with excellence in Grande Sertão: Veredas, with the poetic-reason of María Zambrano, in an attempt to defend literature (poetry) as a valid and coherent way of thinking about reality in contemporaneity. Therefore, the role of the poet is suggested as a kind of mystic who “sacralizes” spaces by reconciling chaos and order in a creative gesture that tries to organize the world. Admitting poetry – chaos – as part of this organization is essential to (re)create reality continuously and ingeniously signify and understand it, perceiving the world as a confluence of stories (from the field of possibilities) and not a history (logical and factual).