The guru of Lopes Chaves

This work studies the personal correspondence of the epistolomaniac Mário de Andrade (1893-1945) according to the principles of contemporary biographical criticism and based on the concept of biographeme formulated by Roland Barthes which allows us to read traces of the author-of his biography-in paratexts such as epistolary writing. It also proposes a tracing of the origins of the practice of intimate writing and genres linked to individual trajectories with an emphasis on personal correspondence in the context of the rise of modern individualism beginning in the mid-18th century in Europe. The conquest of so-called narratives of the self enables in addition to the production of an individual memory the narrative of identity which is plural and mutational in itself and it is this that ultimately this work explores from a transdisciplinary and comparative perspective in Mário's correspondence which is constructed in front of his interlocutors in the form of multiple self-models.