Abstract
Machado de Assis displayed an acute sensitivity to the liminal space that Silviano Santiago refers to as the "space-in-between" (o entre-lugar), which shapes experience. This enhanced his ability to convey a nuanced relationship between various categories of difference – particularly subject and object – compared with that of the normative modern worldview. Located in the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, Machado's perspective, which views categories of difference as inherently relative and interlocking extremes on a continuum, displays an affinity with postmodern sensibilities.
Machado de Assis; criticism; Brazilian literature; modernity; materialist rationalism; realism-naturalism in literature; postmodernism