Deterritorialization and literary form. Contemporary Brazilian literature and urban experience

Abstract

The essay ponders on the tension that can be perceived in the difficulty in representing violent urban environments in contemporary Brazilian literature. Where as in fiction there is a tendency towards a type of narrative similar to the documentary, often reinforced by photojournalistic images, in poetry the relations with the difficult experience of life in big cities appear more obliquely, whether in the figuration of the lurking paranoid in Sebastião Uchoa Leite, or in the spatial instability and feeling of risk in Ângela Melim, Ítalo Moriconi and others, or in the indeterminancy and search of form in Duda Machado - in sum, distinctive modes of deterritorialization in face of an almost irrepresentable experience.