O espaço liminar das listas em romances em inglês

Abstract

The utopian hope, image, and response discussed by Terry Eagleton and Georg Lukács are made evident in The Studhorse Man by the Robert Kroetsch, Waiting for the Barbarians by J. M. Coetzee, The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy, and City of God by E. L. Doctorow in the way the conflicts are, if not resolved, at least given a poetic veneer in the things and objects inventoried on lists. I show how 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 and in the elusiveness of meaning. These novels in English 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.