As ruínas da cidade grande: imagens da experiência urbana na literatura brasileira contemporânea

Abstract

Contemporary Brazilian fiction reveals the city has been a privileged object of thought and poetic imagination. Writers such as Rubem Fonseca, Caio Fernando Abreu, Chico Buarque, João Gilberto Noll e Luiz Ruffato explore the disaggregating aspects of metropolitan life and its effects on processes of subjectivization, sensibilities and modes of social gathering. This literature focuses the city in scenarios, characters, plots and, specially, narrative forms that seem to evoke the difficulty of translating the city we inhabit nowadays. This paper examines the symbolic construction of Brazilian urban experience, analyzing the representations of the city in a selection of fictional works in the perspective of a “literature of subtraction” (FARIA, 1999). We discuss how these works elaborate disenchanted perceptions associated with the loss of the dreamt modern city. While estranging his own time and space, the writer unfolds the losses, ruins and pathologies of urban life in late modern times.