UC Irvine

This project moves through the difficult context of authors producing work that inevitably operates under a national frame of reference with the limitations that this entails. The critical discourse articulated around these works and these figures who overflow the canonical container, are severely underread, or simply exist at the sidelines of national literatures, has not been able to see how there is more at stake in their oeuvre than a compliance or an antagonism with national discourse. The examination I make of the works of Carlos Drummond de Andrade and Igor Barreto in relation to the landscape and mapping, Hilda Hilst and Oswaldo Trejo in relation to kinship, and Miguel James and Carolina Maria de Jesus and the racial democracy discourse, opt for creating a way of reading possibilities of being together that are not vertically sanctioned by the nation-state in contemporary works of literature in Brazil and Venezuela. The trans-local connections and local truths that different ways of seeing and different worlds-of-life help us encounter, will be the emphasis along the different chapters, resisting the constitution of a proposal of a new community and focusing more on the construction of a structure of intelligibility and a reading method that is able to escape national commodification. In this sense, I show throughout the project how nation and critique have invented a mutilated object of study, also restricting the political field and its meaning, subsuming every aesthetic claim under a unique frame of reference in relation to the social. The different conceptual displacements enacted in this dissertation aim to acknowledge the existence and weight of that national frame while at the same time signaling many aesthetic-political instances that make a life outside, in the cracks, or despite of it.