GUIMARÃES ROSA AND LITERATURE AS LIFE Guimarães Rosa’s stories beget a poetic-existential project, which unveils itself in the story “The mirror”, core of the book First stories. In this story
an idea is launched which proposes life as a continuous exertion of creativity, of which depends the conquest of autonomy and the genesis of a self, who brings his existence forth as the author of his own becoming. After presenting the Rosian story and the constellation of poetic concepts it gives rise to, and besides examining the passionate critical operation its reading requires, the present essay assumes the task of interpreting two stories, one from First stories, the other from Tutameia. Third stories ‡ “Darandina “ and “‡ Uai, eu?” ‡ showing the Rosian project in action in two radically distinct situations, which nevertheless retain sufficient similarity to highlight and
embody the primordial idea they proceed from and also to suggest a kinship between first and third stories, associated in what we might name the Rosian pedagogy of existing.