Life on paper sheets: mediated written in Portuguese America

Abstract

Write is to reveal. It is a form to appear on the world, an expression of ideas, using fragments of the past and some projections of tomorrow. Act of a personal manifestation, it can be materialized with another hands. On a conventional or an unusual way, men and women in a different time, left some records of their own existence. On the effort of rescue remembrance, feeling the affections, beliefs and values, some unlearned person, using some mediation, put on paper some representations of reality; thus they have acted socially. Strategically or not, some words and expressions gave passage in pieces of texts, to the own interior, to relationships, or memories, or desires. On this article, we briefly discuss the place and importance of mediated written in Minas Gerais in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth, aspiring detach the potential of this post mortem testaments for the studies about the uses of write on this context. For analysis purposes, we dialogue with authors of linguistics and reference researchers in the study of colonial society.