The ruddy matter: a phraseology of Rosa’s text

Abstract

This study aims to examine Guimarães Rosa’s compositional process—observable in the manuscripts of Grande sertão: veredas —by focusing on how the author conceived his writing material as a repertoire of autonomous phrases and utterances produced prior to the text's final configuration. It seeks to demonstrate that, upon being subsequently inserted into the narrative context, these phrasal units acquire a dual nature: on one hand, they integrate organically into the work's fabric; on the other, they preserve traces of independence, revealing a mode of writing constructed through the juxtaposition and redistribution of fragments. This allows the reader to understand how the phrase, in Rosa’s work, both precedes and transcends the text, functioning simultaneously as a generative cell and as a vestige of the creative process.