Abstract

DEALTRY, Giovanna Ferreira. Facing the windows: the boundaries between private and public and in (post)modernity. Estud. pesqui. psicol. [online]. 2007, vol.7, n.2. ISSN 1808-4281.

The image of a window and its variations are used in this article as a way to discuss the transformation of the concept of public and private that has taken place since the 19th Century. The investigation of Edgar Allan Poe and João do Rio is essential if one is to understand the tension that the individual born in modernity suffers as he/she tries to preserve his/her privacy while being asked to participate in new social structures. Literature and literacy advance in a way that offers order to a world that is increasingly more chaotic, and the birth of the crime novel in the 19th Century is proof of that. However, the new emerging present-day windows, virtual screens that have a central role in both personal and mass communication, make it necessary to investigate the new configurations of an individual's privacy and his/her quest for security in the public space. In that sense, Rubem Fonseca and Luiz Ruffato appear as important names in Brazilian literature for their denunciation of the estrangement between the individual and the city, the latter seen as an undecipherable text.

Keywords : Literature and city; Individual and modernity; Virtual communication.

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