The Ethics of the Object in Modern Brazilian Literature

Download or read book The Ethics of the Object in Modern Brazilian Literature written by Ami Schiess and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Ethics of the Object in Modern Brazilian Literature examines the status and function of objects in Brazilian literary works spanning the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Each work registers and contends with an uncanny encounter with the object--be it a thing proper, an artistic construction or a disciplinary formulation--through a turn to the aesthetic. "The ethics of the object" describes the process by which these objects-as-agents interrupt and impact the creative process by forcing their observers to negotiate with them as something other than passive recipients of the descriptive gaze. By reading works across various genres--poetry, fiction, nonfiction prose and essays--I show that the attempt to pack a disconcerting experience with agential objects back into language results in the emergence, and even mobilization, of literary techniques that confuse and muddle subject and objects, and place the ontological status of the writing subject in doubt. In focusing primarily on the trouble that many different kinds of encounters with alterity wreak upon narration, and by extension on the reader, this dissertation offers a new mode for analyzing the ways in which Brazilian authors contend with difference.