Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Research in Social Sciences and Humanities
Year: 2023
DOI:
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Adélia Prado: Hunger, Love and A Desire for Death
Yun Liu
ABSTRACT:
The Brazilian poet Adélia Prado’s writing covers a wide range of topics, such as everyday life, death, love, corporeality and eternity. In her audatious use of language, words like “eat” and “pray” are put on the same level, intertwined in a symphony that passionately praises the mortal existence. This paper seeks to analyze the expressions of hunger, love and a peculiar desire for death in Adélia’s poetry, showing its convergence and divergence in relation to the Freudian theory of the life drive and the death drive. In a first stage, we will look into the eroticism in Adélia’s poetry, based on the theory of life drive. Subsequently, an observation will be made of the poet’s thoughts about love and death, under the lens of Adélia’s religion. We come to the conclusion that the eroticism in Adélia’s work is not merely in a biological sense, and that her desire for death is not according to the Freudian death drive, but acquired by her Christian faith.
keywords: Adélia Prado, life/death drive, love, death, religion