Millennium Starts: Morphological and Seminal Embryos of Contemporary Brazilian Literature

Abstract:It is always challenging to approach Brazilian literature — for its vitality and richness — through any simplistic scheme, which may make quite difficult a critic’s gesture of cutting and selecting of some condition in order to make it represent complex and partially indecipherable movements. At the same time, it is worth recalling that Brazilian literature and arts are among the most powerful archives of the country’s functioning, capable of grasping some deep figures of a plural, inexhaustible and metamorphic society such as the Brazilian one, constantly criss-crossed by violent historical turbulences, as in the last two decades. With the aim of avoiding what could be simply a long list or a mapping of works, the present article, inspired by the principle of Foucauldian genealogy, tackles a couple of embryonic authors at the threshold of the present millennium. Their legacy, in a certain way, has been drafting the porous horizons of contemporary literary tendencies, creating also strong echoes not only limited within the literary field, but also in the strict, internal dialogue of a structural hendiadys for the Brazilian culture, that is, literature and society. In this perspective, authors such as Luiz Ruffato and Rubens Figueiredo have been forging through their works a peculiar literary space, which is turning their aesthetical engagement in significant and exemplary beginnings of a new millennium’s literary season. It is an alternative way in order to rethink a different ontology of Brazilian literature, in harsh, controversial times.