UC Davis

This study examines a corpus of four twentieth-century Brazilian texts which engage with and problematize metaphors of incorporation: Oswald de Andrade’s “Manifesto Antropófago” (1928), Glauber Rocha’s “Estética da Fome” (1965), Dalton Trevisan’s “O Vampiro de Curitiba,” and Lygia Fagundes Telles’ “Potyra” (2000). Through a model of generative cannibalism developed from Maggie Kilgour’s theorizations on cannibalism and metaphors of incorporation, I argue that each of these texts engage with both the symbolic act of cultural incorporation and reimagines the image of the cannibal and its analogues to problematize the collectivized vision of Brazilian national identity. Whereas Oswald de Andrade and Glauber Rocha subvert the colonial caricature of the cannibal to reconfigure Brazilian national identity formation in relation to foreign, primarily European, traditions, Dalton Trevisan and Lygia Fagundes Telles invoke the figure of the vampire to problematize Brazilian identity from an interior position, highlighting figures of alterity within the Brazilian body politic who would otherwise be obscured. In addition to providing the historical and theoretical background on the presence of cannibalism in the critical bibliography which informs my work, I seek to present an in-depth analysis of the four texts to address the complex ambiguities of Brazilian subjectivity via metaphors of incorporation. Finally, in exploring the intersection of symbolic representations of cannibalism and vampirism, this project intends to illuminate a literary corpus that has not yet been addressed by modern theories.