Deslocamento e Subjetividade em João Gilberto Noll, Silviano Santiago e Bernardo Carvalho.

Abstract

The present dissertation, in the field of contemporary Brazilian Literature, analyzes how three Brazilian writers, João Gilberto Noll (1946-), Bernardo Carvalho (1960-) and Silviano Santiago (1936-), question essentialized and authoritarian positions of national identity through the development of characters traveling to the space of the Other. This questioning is transfigured throughout the metaphor of travel, reflecting a movement that happens in global space, but also in the language that constitutes identities. The work of these Brazilian writers problematizes the dichotomies of self-other, north-south, real-fictional, while attempting to rescue the Modernist consideration of the place of language and discourse as a privileged site to analyze matters related to identity-formation. The dissertation is structured around three movements that correspond to the aesthetic projects of these authors. In João Gilberto Noll's "Berkeley in Bellagio" (2002) and "Lorde" (2004), the metaphor of travel functions as the representation of a traveler moving toward an understanding of his own self. In Bernardo Carvalho's "Nove Noites" (2002) and "Mongólia" (2003), travel functions as a way to contest the truth-value of the essentialized mode of representation of the other carried out by ethnographic discourses, such as travel guides. Finally, in Silviano Santiago's "Stella Manhattan" (1985) and "Viagem ao México" (1995) travel becomes a mechanism that reveals modes of resistance, assimilation, and transformation of the Other, while engaging in a postcolonial debate, within the Latin American context, regarding Western Modernity in the time of global capitalism.