The purposes of fiction in Philip Roth and J.M. Coetzee

• Grant number: 15/02207-7
• Support Opportunities: Regular Research Grants
• Start date: October 01, 2015
• End date: September 30, 2017
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Literature - Literature Theory
• Principal Investigator: Adriano Schwartz
• Grantee: Adriano Schwartz
• Host Institution: Escola de Artes, Ciências e Humanidades (EACH). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil

Abstract

In my previous research, which was produced with Fapesp's support, I examined the relationship between fiction and autobiography in the contemporary novel. My objective now is to revisit one of the more relevant conclusions reached therein: that by means of an improbable instrument, the autobiographical resource, and of an exhaustive and rigorous auto-evaluation, an attempt of fictional reinvention, of fictional validation in a not very propitious environment, is in progress. This is the starting point of this project, which transforms a provisory conclusion in a new assumption, that the non-fictional production of specific authors may help to understand this reinvention process. To deal with such an assumption, two central authors were chosen, Philip Roth and J.M. Coetzee. I will concentrate my study on trying to grasp, from the confrontation between the textual analysis of their literary works and of their essayistic observations and correspondence, an understanding of the reach and limits of the contemporary novel, with a focus to apprehend how this set of texts views, discusses and mainly validates the condition of the artistic doing and the existence of the fiction itself in a time that one of Coetzee's characters called the new "dark times". (AU)