QUIXOTISMOS PÓS-MODERNOS NA NARRATIVA DE CARLOS RIBEIRO

This work aimed to bring to the critical-academic scene the possibility to discuss what to be in the contemporary world means and to verify how the post-modern phenomena (both social and cultural) influence narrative in the present time. This narrative is represented by the prose of Carlos Ribeiro, a writer from Bahia. After all, being chronologically and thematically contemporary, his writing gives us a testimonial of changes as they take place and seems to reflect distorted pictures of post-modernity. At the same time, it brings up many questions and signals some possible answers. In order to reach this aim, this thesis is divided into three chapters. In the first, that which characterizes the context in which his narrative is inserted is examined, a context called post-modern by many theoreticians. A theoretical route is drawn to show the questions that characterize modernity and the questions that distinguish modernity from the present time. Thus, some critical and theoretical voices have been summoned, voices that go beyond their specific areas of study and enrich Humanities as a whole. Among these voices are those of Anthony Giddens, Michel Foucault, Marshall Berman, Octavio Paz and Fredric Jameson. The second chapter brings an analysis of two Carlos Ribeiro’s novels: Lunaris, published in 2007, and Abismo, published in 2004. The analysis follow in the direction of an attempt to identify which are the characteristics of post-modern narrative, to understand from which aspects he narrates, and to find out which representations of the post-modern man and the post-modern world Ribeiro imprints in his writing. The third chapter exposes one of the greatest marks of the present narrative: the mixture, the quoting and the parody of other styles, literary forms and language, which characterized distinct eras and contexts. Ribeiro uses his view and his readings to bring several artistic references, making them coexist with an original and renewed form. However, the most outstanding reference is, undoubtedly, that which gives life to his protagonists. I am referring to a type of fictional protocol founded by the Spanish author Miguel de Cervantes: the quixotism. This noun refers to a way of acting which consists of, among other things, scrambling the narrative voices and the identities, and of subverting the expectation of the story and, thus, the reader’s attention and perception. The quixotism recovered by Ribeiro presents itself as an artistic instrument with which the author seeks to signal the role of fiction in such absurd times.

Keyword:

Post-modernity;Carlos Ribeiro. Narrative. Simulacrum. Quixotism.