Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 The Contemporary in Current Brazilian Literature
- 2 Realisms in Question
- 3 A Paper World—Reflections on the Realism of Luiz Ruffato
- 4 Brazilian Literature and the Market
- 5 The Victorious Return of the Self in Contemporary Writing
- 6 Criticism from the Periphery—for Another Misplaced Idea
- 7 The Challenge of the Sensible and the Sublime Revisited
- 8 Farewell to the Contemporary!
- Bibliography
- Index
6 - Criticism from the Periphery—for Another Misplaced Idea
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 January 2021
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 The Contemporary in Current Brazilian Literature
- 2 Realisms in Question
- 3 A Paper World—Reflections on the Realism of Luiz Ruffato
- 4 Brazilian Literature and the Market
- 5 The Victorious Return of the Self in Contemporary Writing
- 6 Criticism from the Periphery—for Another Misplaced Idea
- 7 The Challenge of the Sensible and the Sublime Revisited
- 8 Farewell to the Contemporary!
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Politics arises between men, and so quite outside of man. There is therefore no real political substance. Politics arises in what lies between men and is established as relationships […] politics organizes those who are absolutely different with a view to their relative equality and in contradistinction to their relative differences.
Hannah ArendtThe relation between center and periphery is an epistemological question that guides a large part of historical discussions in Brazilian criticism and establishes the understanding of national characteristics in opposition to the hegemonic tendencies coming from the outside, namely from Europe and the United States, in particular. It is impossible to understand the discussions around the national question in literature and art since independence without considering this comparative mirror, a necessary condition for identifying differences and recognizing similarities among Brazilian authors and their influences from international canonical models, or from an effectively existing world literature (Weltliteratur). It is clear that the aforementioned relation is not established only among books, that behind it there is the structure of the publishing industry whose expansion introduced literary forms and themes mainly in the novel's attainment of hegemony, as Franco Moretti demonstrated in his famous study of the geography of the nineteenth-century novel (Atlas of the European Novel).
What would be the role, then, if any, of literature produced in Brazil in relation to a Weltliteratur, which Goethe considered to be the necessary future and destiny of German literature? Today, the field of world literature is successfully emerging as an unprecedented success and becoming the lifesaver for the main university programs of comparative literature. In one of his pioneering works on the theme, “Conjectures on World Literature” (2000), the critic Franco Moretti tries to model a theory on the world expansion of the European novel that is inspired by Darwinian evolutionism and by Immanuel Wallerstein's world-systems theory and economic history. Moretti thinks of world literature in parallel to world capitalism as a system that is both “one” and “unequal,” and which developed in the expansion of the center to the periphery. By dominating or subjugating and even eliminating traditional genres and forms, such a system thus accompanies the political and economic development of colonization and neocolonization by creating roots in cultures with less history and tradition, on the one hand, and inspiring creativity, on the other, but only after overcoming the first derivative resistances.
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- Chapter
- Information
- Affect and Realism in Contemporary Brazilian Fiction , pp. 87 - 100Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2020