Lendas urbanas: argumentação e coerção social

Abstract

This research intends to analyze the uses of memory around urban legends. We aim, thus, to understand the functioning of the legend “Corpo Seco” (and its versions), observing how, in the enunciative event, these narratives circulate and (re)produce new and other meanings about the history, memory and the subject's imagination. Our research moves towards discussions on how such narratives put into operation a saying about the history, memory and the constitutive imagination of subjects. Based on the perspectives of Renard (1999), urban legends arise in an attempt to explain phenomena and events that would be inscribed in the order of the inexplicable and the incomprehensible, situated in the symbolic space where logic and reality cannot account for the facts of everyday life, thus sustaining fears, anxieties and desires, whose explanation is based on the supernatural. With this research, we seek to extol the cultural practices and procedures of (re)signification of the legends urban, thus understanding (re)signified practices and their effects today.