Entre a rua do Acre e o subúrbio de São Geraldo: perspectivas jusliterárias do direito à cidade em romances de Clarice Lispector

Abstract

The dissertation, situated within a jusliterary studies framework, seeks to contribute to the conception of the right to the city – that is, the right to a transformed and renewed urban life – through the narratives of Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector. Based on the novels The Besieged City (1949) and The Hour of the Star (1977), the right to the city is explored as a fundamental, social and collective right. The symbolic and pragmatic dimensions of urban lives are adopted as the basis, to understand urban space as an arena of complex social relations. This research is justified due to the widespread crisis in cities, marked by the collapse of various institutions and the processes of exclusion and inequality in urban spaces. Accordingly, it raises the need for the constitutionalization of the right to the city as an autonomous and interdependent guarantee, as well as the need to embrace "legal surrealism" to overcome the purely corporeal conception of urban space. Furthermore, the research aims to demonstrate that these precarious conditions phenomenologically intersect with the (non)existence of the citizen-characters Lucrécia Neves and Macabéa, whose lives are either erased or emphasized by the dynamics of the cities. From this perspective, the relational and symbiotic experience between the city and the individual becomes essential for reflecting on urban disintegration, allowing an investigation into urban spaces, sociospatial segregation, and the position of citizens amid perceived social transformations. The methodology adopted is qualitative, theoretical, transdisciplinary, and interdisciplinary, anchored in the hermeneutic-phenomenological method, aligned with the research line "The Process of Constitutionalization of Rights and Citizenship: Theoretical and Methodological Aspects". This method is justified not only due to its suitability for transdisciplinary research but also because of its connection to the literary production of Clarice Lispector.