The Jesuit letters and the speech genres

Abstract

This work, with a discursive bias, presents reflections that are part of the study of Brazilian colonial letters. The main objective is to investigate and discuss the epistolary genre as a discursive genre, as understood in the Bakhtinian perspective. For this, an analysis is made in some of the fundamental texts by Alcir Pécora and João Adolfo Hansen in which the Jesuit letters were treated. Methodologically, therefore, the research works with an archival corpus, that is, with enunciation present in texts already published in books, taking it in a comparative perspective. The fundamental result is the understanding of the Jesuit letters as a speech genre, which allows the knowledge of the production’s conditions of Jesuit statements and combat certain interpretive anachronism. Finally, a hypothesis of the importance of the notion of discursive subject is made in order to seek the correct understanding of the indigenous peoples’ representation in epistolary’ colonial studies.