Novelistic ruins: textual fragmentation and contemporary british literature
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Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais
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Artigo de periódico
Título alternativo
Ruínas Novelistas: Fragmentação Textual e Literatura Britânica Contemporânea
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Resumo
The article discusses both the textual fragmentation and the utopian space of literary lists in
Ian McEwan’s Atonement, Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in The Night-
Time, Hilary Mantel’s Bring up the Bodies, and Zadie Smith’s White Teeth by following the
lead of Terry Eagleton and Georg Lukács. It is my contention that the utopian hope, image,
and response created in contemporary novels are evident in the way contradictions acquire a
poetic veneer in the things and objects inventoried on lists. It is to the aid of an ars
disjunctoria that the postmodernist novelists have returned and this return spells out as the
utopian hope towards, image of, and response to, the willingness to allow the newly released
parts of narrative to float, mingle, and monumentalize themselves as ruins. This utopian space
created with the help of lists in contemporary novels has to do with the relative failure of
formal realism and with the hardening of the conclusion, reached by Eagleton and Lukács,
that to narrate is itself a moral act. The article also discusses the extent to which the lists in the
said novels participate in the overall break-up of language, in the collapse of narrative, in the
clash of subjective standpoints, in the fragility of value, in the elusiveness of meaning, and in
the creation of a “ruinous” present. The conclusion points to how contemporary novels tend to
give us a kind of foreshortening of perception through the use of lists, enumerations, and
inventories which suspend language, narrative, subjectivity, value, and meaning in their
dizzying voraciousness and infinity.
Abstract
A esperança, a imagem e a resposta utópicas discutidas por Terry Eagleton e Georg Lukács se
tornam evidentes nos romances elencados neste artigo (Atonement de Ian McEwan, The
Curious Incident of the Dog in The Night-Time de Mark Haddon, Bring up the Bodies de
Hilary Mantel e White Teeth de Zadie Smith) na maneira que os conflitos são, se não
resolvidos, pelo menos revestidos de uma aparência insólita nas coisas e objetos inventariados
em listas. O que eu proponho neste artigo é pensar como as listas dos referidos romances
participam na ruptura da linguagem, no colapso da narrativa, no confronto de perspectivas, na
fragilidade do valor e na vacuidade de sentido. Os romances contemporâneos tendem a nos
dar um tipo de atalho na percepção por meio do uso de listas, enumerações e inventários, os
quais suspendem a linguagem, a narrativa, a subjetividade, o valor e o sentido, em sua confusa
voracidade e infinidade.
Assunto
Ficção inglesa, Literatura inglesa
Palavras-chave
Lists, Utopia, Contemporary Ruins
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Endereço externo
http://www4.unifsa.com.br/revista/index.php/fsa/article/view/1588