Coexistence, subjectivity and violence in the contemporary brazilian novel

Abstract

As social changes accelerate in Brazil, as economic contradictions worsen and the standard of living of subaltern social groups deteriorates, this problematic national reality becomes one of the privileged themes of Brazilian literature. This article studies how the urban narrative, since the seventies, reacted to this phenomenon. The changes in the perspectives of the narrators in the representation of violence and in the subjectivities confronted by these increasingly challenging experiences are analyzed. If, for modernity, human “living” was always a life that was concretized in the development of the subjectivity of each individual, it is argued here that the mere “survival,” to which so many are reduced under the present conditions, makes one renounce any expectation of cultivating and living one’s own subjectivity.