SciELO - Scientific Electronic Library Online

 
vol.9 issue2Producing subjectivity: What does it means?Reaction to tutor performance of distance course: validation of a scale author indexsubject indexarticles search
Home Pagealphabetic serial listing  

Services on Demand

article

Indicators

Share


Estudos e Pesquisas em Psicologia

On-line version ISSN 1808-4281

Abstract

GERMANO, Idilva Maria Pires. Ruins of the metropolis: images of urban experience in Brazilian contemporary literature. Estud. pesqui. psicol. [online]. 2009, vol.9, n.2. ISSN 1808-4281.

Contemporary Brazilian fiction reveals the city has been a privileged object of thought and poetic imagination. Writers such as Rubem Fonseca, Caio Fernando Abreu, Chico Buarque, João Gilberto Noll e Luiz Ruffato explore the disaggregating aspects of metropolitan life and its effects on processes of subjectivization, sensibilities and modes of social gathering. This literature focuses the city in scenarios, characters, plots and, specially, narrative forms that seem to evoke the difficulty of translating the city we inhabit nowadays. This paper examines the symbolic construction of Brazilian urban experience, analyzing the representations of the city in a selection of fictional works in the perspective of a “literature of subtraction” (FARIA, 1999). We discuss how these works elaborate disenchanted perceptions associated with the loss of the dreamt modern city. While estranging his own time and space, the writer unfolds the losses, ruins and pathologies of urban life in late modern times.

Keywords : Urban experience; Brazilian literature; City in contemporary fiction.

        · abstract in Portuguese     · text in Portuguese     · Portuguese ( pdf )

 

Creative Commons License All the contents of this journal, except where otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License