Abstract
“Is it so dangerous to speak of what unleashes?”, asks Laura Erber in the text (poem?) “A retornada”, which closes the eponymous book released by Reliquary Editions in 2017. Erber’s writing, which seems to combine biographical details and elements that tend towards autofictional speculation, is organized around a binomial: the questioning of an author's presence that refers to the construction of self and to the form and the critical exercise undertaken by the whole work. In the first place, the comfort of the presence of a lyrical self, which would indicate a certain appropriateness to the form, comes before the author's confessed feeling about the classificatory imprecision of the whole book. Extracting gender labels from Laura Erber’s text, and to some extent relativizing the notion of literary autonomy, we are interested in exploring the construction of a self-design (Groys, 2016GROYS, Boris (2016). La obligación del diseño de si. Traducción del Paola Cortes Rocca. In: GROYS, Boris. Volverse público: las transformaciones del arte en el ágora contemporânea. Buenos Aires: Caja Negra. p. 21-36.) and the author's critical exercise (Laddaga, 2013LADDAGA, Reinaldo (2013). Estética de laboratório: estratégias das artes do presente. Tradução de Magda Lopes. São Paulo: Martins Fontes.) both linked to form, in which several textual indexes seek to guide its reception, despite imploding its readers’ horizon of expectations (Jauss, 1994JAUSS, Hans Robert (1994). A história literária como provocação à teoria da literatura. Tradução de Sérgio Tellaroli. São Paulo: Ática.).
Keywords:
self-design; form; reader