Literature as space: sketch of a genealogy

Abstract

Starting from an observation about a group of novels released almost at the same time in the second semester of 2015 (O ano em que vivi de literatura, O princípio de ver histórias em todo lugar, História da Chuva e Só faltou o título), this article, in dialogue with Ettore Finazzi-Agrò’s and Michel Certeau’s concepts, proposes a way to look to the presence of characters that are writers in the brazilian literature. Instead of adopting a matafictional or an autofictional interpretation, the hypothesis tries to think about the possibility to understand the literature as an imaginary space or as “memory sites”, in the sense that Finazzi-Agrò (2013) gives to Pierre Nora's concept . It means conceptual sites able to generate a diversity of characters, multiple human conflicts and – above all – able to elaborate the Brazilian reality and its complexities through the fiction. This way to look allows to imagine the sketch of a genealogy of the literature as a space (and not as a subject) in the Brazilian literature. To exemplify the potential of this way of looking and thinking, the novels cited here are briefly discussed from authors such as Sérgio Sá (2010), Paolo Virno (2013) and Mark Fisher (2021).