Another Nature: Nature and the City in Brazilian Short Fiction, 1950-2000

Gold, Adi

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Year:: 2019
Contributor:: Gold, Adi (creator); Vieira, Nelson (Advisor); Valente, Luiz (Reader); Sobral, Patricia (Reader); Brown University. Department of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies (sponsor)
Genre:: theses
Subject:: Literature; Brazil; Brazilian literature; Fiction; Short stories; ecology; Human-animal relationships; nature; Ecocriticism; New materialism; Urban literature; Cities
Extent:: viii, 130 p.

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Abstract:: In this dissertation I examine the relationship between nature and city as it manifests in Brazilian short stories from the 1950s to the 1990s, particularly ones set in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. During this period Brazil became increasingly urbanized and the refocusing on the city as central to cultural production created a new context for the relationship between nature and city to be addressed, reorienting a historically established dichotomy between the two. I contextualize this dichotomy in an analysis of the significance that has been attributed to representations of Brazil’s natural environments in the construction of a national and literary identity, from the first contacts with Europe and into the 20th-century, and argue that with the shift to metropolis-centered Brazilian cultural production was an accompanying shift, in literature, from a preoccupation with national identity to a preoccupation with individual experience and subjectivity. Through close reading of short stories written in the second half of the 20th-century by canonical Brazilian authors, namely Rubem Braga, Clarice Lispector, Rubem Fonseca, João Antônio, Lygia Fagundes Telles and Ignácio de Loyola Brandão, this dissertation presents a study of the ways in which fictional narratives permit an interpretation of natural phenomena as functioning within urban environments to mediate individuals’ negotiations with their sense of self and place. Informed by ecocriticism and new materialism, the readings offer examples of human-animal relations that challenge conventional definitions of subjectivity and personhood; of interpretations of urban environments as animate and possessing of agency; and of a reconfiguration of the traditional conventions of fugere urbem and green retreat which, I propose, have the effect of compounding, rather than separating nature and city. Whether material or conceptual, nature is represented not as antithetical to the urban, but as a presence embedded into and essential to the structure and workings of the city and to the identity and imagination of its inhabitants, suggesting that nature and city are not merely dichotomic concepts but, rather, form an integral experience comprised of both.
Notes:: Thesis (Ph. D.)--Brown University, 2019

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Gold, Adi, "Another Nature: Nature and the City in Brazilian Short Fiction, 1950-2000" (2019). Portuguese and Brazilian Studies Theses and Dissertations. Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library. https://repository.library.brown.edu/studio/item/bdr:1129506/

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Portuguese and Brazilian Studies Theses and Dissertations

Theses and Dissertations for the Portuguese and Brazilian Studies department.
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