A novel manifesto: La vida breve, by Juan Carlos Onetti

• Grant number: 14/09668-7
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: July 01, 2014
• End date: December 31, 2014
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Literature - Modern Foreign Literatures
• Principal Investigator: Wilson Alves Bezerra
• Grantee: Amanda Fanny Guethi
• Host Institution: Centro de Educação e Ciências Humanas (CECH). Universidade Federal de São Carlos (UFSCAR). São Carlos , SP, Brazil

Abstract

This project aims to analyze the work La Vida Breve ( 1950 ), by the Uruguayan Juan Carlos Onetti like a novel - manifesto comprehending it as a text which definitely draws thematic and stylistic traces of the author: the creation of narratives embedded in which characters create stories, realities and other characters, showing the processes of fictional elaboration; the city as a representative space of its time and urban language as a mean and as a new form of Uruguayan literature. Moreover, this novel divides his work into the early-stage and mature stages. Romance - manifest also, because this work is novel and fictionalized by its structure and its aesthetic purpose and it is, at the same time, a literary manifesto of its author in the same textual body. It is his poetic ars written by critical practice, it is process and result ( BECERRA, 2009), inseparable from its precedents literary and critical works. This discussion will be undertaken in order to relate the scope of the concept of novel - manifest to the context of Latin American literary modernity as described by Octavio Paz (2013 [ 1974 ] ) - critics - Carlos Fuentes (2013 [ 1969 ] ) - ambiguous and alienated - and the very Onetti from some of his critical writing: "We believe that literature is an art. Sacred thing accordingly; never a means, but rather an end. (Onetti apud VERANI , 2009 [ 1981] :8). (AU)