Deterritorialization and literary form: Brazilian contemporary literature and urban experience

Abstract

The study deals with the mediations between the urban social organization and the artistic form in contemporary Brazilian literature. It tries to contrast close, direct accounts, works that register explicitly the violent and excluding elements of everyday life in large Brazilian cities, works based on duplication and representability, to some processes of defiguration and deterritorialization which are also structural to Brazilian contemporary literature, and function as particularly critical interlocutors of an urban experience of violence, instability and segregation. For, if an imaginary representation of fear and violence is what fundamentally organizes the dominant urban landscape of Brazilian contemporary literature, what is habitual in the more documentary and illustrative urban literature is not the unfolding of perspective but rather the criminalpathological cataloguing of places and human types, the fear of social heterogeneity, the criminalization of social divisions, the reinforcement of a kind f urban paranoia - which partly explains the popularization, in tune with a generalized insecurity, of crime stories and detective thrillers in Brazil since the 1980-1990 decades. But this does not necessarily mean an increase in the complexity of formal processes, of literary practice and of the recent historical experience. A growing formal complexity and social awareness often resulting not exactly from this representational imposition, from the explicit, illustrative literary portraits of the urban, but rather from the production of nonrepresentational spaces and liminal, ambivalent, transitional zones of subjectivity, which I try to put into focus in this essay.