Pelas fronteiras: andarilhos em J.M. Coetzee e João Gilberto Noll

Abstract

A céu aberto and Life & Times of Michael K can be considered pioneers in the presentation of wanderers – characters who became an asset in contemporary literature. The novels are exemplary in their writers’ efforts to deal with the boundaries of language and representation, representing experimental books of authors interested in challenging the linearity of a plot and the referential function of language. By following the errant path of these characters, the present dissertation demonstrates how wanderers crack historiography, since they have always been present in modern societies, but are away from the main theories of the period and the legitimate forms of documentation. This hypothesis is validated by contrasting the wanderer`s way of life to concepts such as Marx’s lumpenproletariat, Benjamin’s flaneur and Deleuze and Guattari’s deterritorialization. Simultaneously, the novels show how ambivalent concepts as renouncement and resistance, need and desire, freedom and oppression build their path. The texts also point to the frontier as the place where the violences that assemble modernity are more evident, but also as the location where escaping from them is somehow possible. Finally, the comparison between Coetzee and Noll reinforces the relevance of a literary criticism from the global South, taking the geographical boundary as a concept for aesthetic and political propositions. Establishing comparative literature with the same criteria that bring together projects of the global South is a possible pathway for a literary theory that aims to reflect on contemporary geopolitical conflicts.