O João Cabral de Melo Neto's O cão sem plumas: the human poetic-allegorical fragment

Abstract

This article aims to identify how allegory collaborates in the apprehension of the poem “O cão sem plumas”, by João Cabral de Melo Neto, whose analysis was guided by theoretical assumptions defended by Walter Benjamin (2004), João Adolfo Hansen (2006), Erich Auerbach (2006), Umberto Eco (2010) and Sérgio Paulo Rouanet (1984). By establishing the reading of Cabral’s poem in the light of allegory in Classical Antiquity, based on rhetoric, and modernity, linked to history, the dialectical method allowed recording a productive dialogue between text and context. The aesthetic result of these inferences alludes to the configuration of an anthropromorphized dog that mirrors that Capibaribe River, an image that, displaced in time, allowed the observation of environmental degradation and the exploitation of men situated on the margins of social development in the city of Recife.