A distopia na literatura brasileira do século XX

Abstract

Emerging in the 19th century, and popularized during the 20th century, mainly in works of literature in English, the literary dystopia is a genre of writing that speculates about the possibilities of alternative social constructions by imagining hellish worlds that are constituted as the result of intentional political actions. Due to its great potential for generating narrative conflicts, along with the constancy of wars, violence, and injustices that marked the vast majority of world societies during the 20th century - and that remain during these first two decades of the 21st century -, dystopia, dark sister of utopia, encompasses a growing number of works that have generated a considerable corpus of research in literary and cultural studies. In Brazilian literature, the first dystopias emerged in the 20th century, and have been written and analyzed ever since. Given the relevance and the aesthetic and social impact of this literary type, this thesis aims to map the dystopia genre within an exclusive corpus of 20th-century Brazilian literature, listing works that can be understood, within the perspectives of this genre, according to certain formal and thematic criteria, as observed by a number of researchers within the fruitful interdisciplinary field known as Utopian Studies. As a result of this mapping, thirteen dystopian works were identified and analyzed. Thus, all these works are addressed, however with a longer and more specific analytical focus on three of them.: 3 Meses no Século 81 (1947), by Jerônymo Monteiro; Não Verás País Nenhum (1981), by Ignácio de Loyola Brandão; and 9225: Ficção da Nova Era (1989), by Regina Sylvia. Through the critical study of these works, which comprehends the analysis of different themes, forms, images, and stylistic resources, it is possible to investigate ways in which these dystopias fictionally represent negative aspects of Brazilian society. I also observe the dialogues between Brazilian and English-language dystopias. Therefore, the critical investigation directed to this selection, allows us to understand the configurations of the dystopian genre in a particular way in Brazilian literature in the 20th century, considering the social and literary elements that are unique to Brazilian society, history, and culture.