THE CONSTRUCTION AND DECONSTRUCTION OF SOCIAL CRITICISM IN THE WORKS OF WRITER HÉLIO SEREJO

Abstract

This article analyzes how social criticism is constructed and, at the same time, destabilized in the writings of Hélio Serejo, focusing on representations of yerba-mate labor, power relations, forms of social classification, and tensions between official discourse and lived experience on the Brazil–Paraguay border. The study assumes that Serejo's social criticism cannot be reduced to explicit denunciation: it emerges from the narrative organization of everyday situations, from the exposure of asymmetries structuring labor, and from the incorporation of voices and experiences that challenge legitimizing discourses. At the same time, the narrative produces deconstructive movements by shifting apparently stable categories, especially when a character initially defined through negative attributes is reinscribed through positive characteristics and when political discourse about the border is confronted by the worker's concrete memory. The corpus focuses on passages from Vida de erval (volume IV) and Pelas oxilhas da fronteira (volume V), both part of Obras completas de Hélio Serejo. The dialogue with Antonio Candido, Alfredo Bosi, Georg Lukács, Walter Benjamin, Mikhail Bakhtin, Pierre Bourdieu, Stuart Hall and Jacques Derrida supports a reading that articulates literary form, social experience, language and memory. The article argues that Serejo's critical originality lies less in a univocal position toward the social world than in the tension among denunciation, the valorization of border experience, humanization and persistent ambivalent discourses.