Retórica do sermão da sexagésima: a hermenêutica bíblica como fundamento da argumentação e do estilo.

Abstract

There are many discussions about the nature of Father Antonio Vieira s work: some critics try to classify his oratory as a classic, others as baroque; some classify him as culteranist others as conceptist. There is also another debate about his sermons being or not part of the literary canon; this polemical view has been exhausted by various critical approaches. By the same token, concurrent with these questions, there are others of different nature, not yet sufficiently clarified, such as those concerning the nature of the rhetoric present in his work. Among all these questions, there is a peculiar one: if Sermão da Sexagésima would be a small treatise on rhetoric , or to be more precise what kind of rhetoric would Vieira explicit and recommend in this sermon? This question is the main problem of this dissertation. To investigate it, we have manipulated a long bibliography on the issue, consulting the most important authors who have reflected on this topic. Based on a theoretical framework methodology provided with texts on Rhetoric and Hermeneutics, by authors such as Plebe (1978), Curtius (1979), Saraiva (1980), Todorov (1980), Tringali (1984, 1988), Reboul (1998) and Eagleton (1999), we concluded that Sermão da Sexagésima points to a sacred rhetoric , more than to a baroque one.