The letter roars, the plow corresponds, the roar plows: utopias of community in contemporary Brazilian literature

Abstract

Alongside the rise of authoritarianism in politics and the emergence of a period of hopelessness marked by the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic, there is a symptom that can be detected in several novels of contemporary Brazilian literature, precisely the elaboration in the fictional tissues of figurations of community utopias. In the case of the corpus focused on in this article — Carta à rainha louca, by Maria Valéria Rezende (2019), Torto arado, by Itamar Vieira Junior (2019), and O som do rugido da onça, by Micheliny Verunschk (2021) — this utopia projects a future with human rights preserved by reconstructing the past from other perspectives, underlining the denunciation of systemic violence against the marginalized and the latent revolt that demands reparation against the systemic violence in Brazilian society. Based on the analysis of textual and extratextual aspects, knowing that the boundary between these domains is porous, the article examines two developments: the thematic constitution in the plot of events that figure utopian communities and the elaboration of the narrators’ voices, which outline tensions between representation and alterity.

Keywords:
literature and society; utopian communities; narrator; history against the grain and fiction