Literature in times of barbarism: a study of brazilian contemporary novels

• Grant number: 23/13152-5
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Post-Doctoral
• Start date: September 01, 2024
• End date: August 31, 2026
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Sociology - Other specific Sociologies
• Principal Investigator: Alexandro Henrique Paixão
• Grantee: Gisele Novaes Frighetto
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Educação (FE). Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Campinas , SP, Brazil

Abstract

This project proposes the study of the the relationship between literature and barbarism in the present time based on the investigation of contemporary brazilian novels. Although it is represented through the narrative of events of very different historical and social dimensions, we understand that an "aesthetics of barbarism" would be productive to understand the prose of contemporary brazilian writers, due to the permanence of realism as refraction and mediation, as well as to the existance of structures of feeling connected to the experience of a "hostile world". From a thematic point of view, it is necessary to observe that the meaning of barbarism is not univocal, nor stable in time, and goes back to the very idea of civilization as its antonym. However, the understanding of the inhumanity of the colonizing processes led to a crisis of civilization, which was also triggered by the experience of destruction of the enlightenment civilisational project after two world wars. A dialectic of enlightenment demonstrates how Western reason has functioned as an instrument of a logic that plunders capitalism and, consequently, it becomes a violent weapon of reduction of the different, which is exacerbated on the periphery of contemporary neoliberal capitalism. Based on these assumptions, an aesthetic of barbarism is thought of as resistance, through the literary representation of the dehumanization brought by colonialism and by states of exception. These aspects will be studied in the relations between literature and society based on an initial corpus composed of the novels O avesso da pele (2020), by Jeferson Tenório; O som do rugido da onça (2021), by Micheliny Verunschk; Uma tristeza infinita (2021), by Antônio Xerxenesky and O riso dos ratos (2021), by Joca Reiners Terron.