O Eixo e a Roda: Revista de Literatura Brasileira
A revista O Eixo e a Roda tem como objetivo fomentar a produção teórica, crítica e ensaística na área de Literatura Brasileira, dando a oportunidade para que pesquisadores do Brasil e do exterior divulguem suas pesquisas e contribuam para o debate qualificado nesta área de estudos.
Copyright (c) 2025 Jorge Manzi, Fábio Roberto Lucas, Rebeca Errázuriz-Cruz
O dossiê que aqui apresentamos se constituiu a partir de uma chamada interessada nas complexidades próprias à figuração da coletividade na literatura brasileira moderna e contemporânea. Ao visar esse arco temporal que congrega e tensiona reciprocamente procedimentos artísticos do início do século XX ao início do XXI, o que convocava nosso interesse era a presença de diferentes modos de trabalhar com a matéria heterogênea do social, seja nas montagens e na heteroglossia do modernismo de 1922, seja nas formas geminadas e corais que, nos termos de Flora Süssekind, despontaram na literatura da Nova República.
This article examines the construction of Black female collectivity in Insubmissas lágrimas de mulheres, by Conceição Evaristo, focusing on the interplay between identity and difference. Grounded in the author’s critique of the historical representation of Black women in Brazilian literature—often reduced to racist and sexist stereotypes—the study explores how Evaristo employs a strategic essentialism to reclaim and reframe such representations. Motherhood, resistance, and shared memory emerge as key elements in shaping a collective experience that, while internally diverse, affirms solidarity among women. Drawing on theorists such as bell hooks and Audre Lorde, the article argues that difference, rather than impeding unity, becomes the basis for a collective identity. Evaristo’s work articulates a literary form that challenges the dichotomy between the individual and the collective, amplifying multiple Black female voices that, in narrating their lives, establish a political space of enunciation and belonging. In this way, the text contributes to ongoing discussions about contemporary forms of figuration of the collective in Brazilian literature, particularly through narratives shaped by the intersection of gender, race, and class.
Dossiê: Formas do coletivo na literatura brasileira moderna e contemporânea
This article aims to present some findings from a broader research project focused on the comparative analysis of two novels by Antonio Callado: Quarup (1967) and Reflexos do Baile (1976). Despite their differences, it is suggested that both works are part of an integrated fictional project whose purpose is to deeply investigate Brazilian reality during the civil-military dictatorship. From this perspective, the study also seeks to identify how the social and political changes of the post-coup period resonate in each narrative, shaping not only recurring themes but also the structural elements of the novelistic forms in discussion. In this process, it becomes evident that historical elements, such as the intensification of repression and censorship, the defeat of the armed left, the rise of the culture industry, and the contradictory nature of Brazil’s conservative modernization, generated narrative impasses that Callado’s writing sought to address through specific aesthetic strategies.
Copyright (c) 2025 Adeline Alves Vassaitis
The article analyzes how Luiz Ruffato, in Eles eram muitos cavalos, stages the contemporary urban experience through an aesthetics of fragmentation and chorality. It adopts as method the articulation of theoretical frameworks drawn from literary studies, contemporary art, and aesthetic theory, with particular emphasis on the concepts of remnants of the real (Garramuño, 2009, 2014), the installation-novel (Carvalho, 2005; Reiss, 2012), and Agamben’s (2009) notion of contemporaneity. The analysis reveals that the novel disrupts narrative linearity and is constructed as a literary installation comprised of multiple discursive forms – voices, documents, scenes, and noises – which blur the lines between fiction and reality. It argues that chorality, rather than promoting harmony, generates a persistent collision of dissonant voices that reflect the precariousness, invisibility, and social violence present in the city of São Paulo. The article concludes that formal fragmentation is not merely a stylistic device, but rather a critical strategy that, by staging the darkness of the present, in Agamben’s terms, exposes the collapse of traditional representational forms, thereby transforming literature into a space of resistance, and denunciation of urban inequalities.
FRANCA, Yasmin. Salmoura. Cotia, SP: Urutau, 2024.
Resenha do livro de poesia Salmoura, de Yasmin Franca, publicado em 2024.
Copyright (c) 2025 Pablo Vinícius Nunes Garcia
O presente número de O Eixo e a Roda apresenta, como é habitual, uma gama de artigos que abordam a literatura brasileira sob distintos vieses críticos, de modo que o leitor se encontra diante de um panorama daquilo que está sendo produzido nas universidades em diferentes partes do país.
Copyright (c) 2025 Carolina Serra Azul , Gustavo Silveira Ribeiro
This article investigates the figure of the golem in the novel Pantokrator, by Ricardo Labuto Gondim, as an icon of the tensions experienced by the proletarian class in the 21st century. Through the analysis of literary utterances permeated by the unusual, it examines how the narrative construction of the golem translates the complexities and oppressions faced by subaltern classes in a global and technological context. The literary unusual, grounded in the reflections of Irène Bessière and Remo Ceserani, is considered here not merely as escapism, but as a device that provokes meaning effects, subverts conventions, and allows for the exploration of ambiguities and ethical dilemmas inherent to contemporaneity marked by automation and rising inequalities. The analysis focuses on the trajectory of the golem protagonist, his relationships and reflections, highlighting how the novel addresses the boundaries between technology, subjectivity, and power under late capitalism. The study is supported by an interdisciplinary approach, also articulating the psychoanalytic concepts of the Real, the Symbolic, and the Imaginary from Jacques Lacan, which help explain the presence of the unspeakable and the traumatic in the fictionalized proletarian experience. In addition, it employs Dominique Maingueneau’s category of constituent discourses to analyze the role of literature in shaping meanings and social identities. The conclusion is that Pantokrator exemplifies how the literary unusual can rework contemporary political and cultural issues, turning the golem into a mirror reflecting the anxieties and challenges of workers faced with technological changes and the power structures of the 21st century.
Este dossiê é o desdobramento de um diálogo iniciado no XIII Congresso Brasileiro de Hispanistas, realizado em Florianópolis, na Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina (UFSC), entre os dias 5 e 9 de agosto de 2024. Naquele encontro, um grupo de pesquisadoras e pesquisadores se reuniu em torno de um mesmo gesto: pensar os modos como a escrita toca o corpo — e é tocada por ele — em suas dimensões políticas, afetivas e materiais. O que nasceu como um simpósio temático expandiu-se, desde então, em reflexões que ultrapassam fronteiras nacionais e disciplinares, consolidando-se agora neste volume 34, número 3, da revista O Eixo e a Roda como um território indivisível: espaço de contágio entre corpo e linguagem, entre estética e existência, entre Brasil e América hispânica.
Copyright (c) 2025 Ellen Maria Martins Vasconcellos, Débora Duarte dos Santos, Ana Carolina Macena Francini
This article presents a study of the work O corpo interminável (2019), by contemporary Brazilian writer Claudia Lage. First, it develops a reflection on the interlocutions between literature and history, highlighting how fiction can offer new perspectives on the past, and emphasizing that historiographical and literary discourses share a dialectical relationship, a characteristic that allows the construction of plural memories and distinct interpretations. Then, based on the understanding that, in the fight against the process of forgetting, literature and history are memory-producing, complementary and dialogic knowledge, an analysis of Lage's literary narrative is developed, based on the consideration of historical elements related to the civic-military dictatorship in Brazil, such as torture and the disappearance of people for political reasons. The analytical focus is on the character Daniel, the son of a disappeared guerrilla fighter, who seeks to reconstruct his mother's story from fragments, documents, reports and a book he finds with her notes. Regarding the theoretical-critical framework used in the elaboration of the text, the contributions of Michel Foucault (1992), Florentina da Silva Souza (2015), Ana Maria Colling (2013), Hayden White (1994), Jeanne Marie Gagnebin (2009), Jaime Ginzburg (2010), Márcio Seligmann-Silva (2022) and Lilia Schwarcz (2019), among others.
Copyright (c) 2025 Dra. Josiele Kaminski Corso Ozelame, Dr. Felipe dos Santos Matias
Deleuze-Guattarian Writing is the Creation of a Body without Organs
In this article, we problematize and make an attempt to heuristically define the Deleuze-Guattarian writing on the plateau entitled November 28, 1947: How Do You Make Yourself a Body Without Organs? (plateau 6). We mapped the multiple literary arrangements of plateau 6, while taking into account their argumentative contexts. We analyzed, above all, the theorizations and ethical implications resulting from the process of creation of the drugged, schizo and masochist bodies. With such bodies, we elucidate the apprehension and appropriation procedures that Deleuze and Guattari adopt when building zones of indiscernibility between philosophy, psychoanalysis and literature. Furthermore, we seek to demonstrate that, in the aforementioned plateau, the authors not only build intensive and cross-cutting connections between heterogeneous domains of knowledge, but also articulate writing style, critical positioning and conceptual creation in an open system. We maintain that Deleuze-Guattarian writing, as a compositional activity, is the creation of a Body without Organs.
Dossiê: Territórios indivisíveis: Corpo, escrita e política no Brasil e na América hispânica
Copyright (c) 2025 Wagner Honorato Dutra, Roberta Carvalho Romagnoli
Through a close analysis of the third poem in Cenas de abril (“olho muito tempo o corpo de um poema...”), the essay seeks to outline a general reading hypothesis for Ana Cristina Cesar’s work, linking it, on the one hand, to the artistic and literary panorama of Brazil in the context of the military dictatorship and, on the other, to the historical situation of agreed redemocratization for which she formulates an agonizing poetic solution; a solution which, by tensing rival concepts of poetry, tries, in my opinion, to subsume the opposition between constructivism and spontaneity, art and life, language and body, making form, through the dynamic structure of the poem, the place of experience.
Bodies, things and politics of mourning in Huaco retrato (2021), by Gabriela Wiener
This article presents an analysis of the work of mourning performed by the narrator of Peruvian writer Gabriela Wiener’s book Huaco retrato, using Judith Butler’s theory of human vulnerability and the notion of infinite mourning presented by Christian Dunker. The paper also examines the circulation of bodies and things in Wiener’s writing, based on the observations of Roberto Esposito and Aníbal Quijano. Similarly, the notion of atmosphere helps to discuss the production of affection. The results suggest that Huaco retrato questions the unequal distribution of mourning by linking intimate losses to memories of racial discrimination and demands for collective reparations. In the process, the writing of the body reveals the relationship between mourning and desire, challenging the subject/object division that underlies the European paradigm of rationality.
Body, Writing, and Violence in The Love of Singular Men
The text re-reads the construction of the novel The Love of Singular Men through the marking of the colonial heritage in the division and segregation of the characters. By analyzing passages from Camilo’s narrative and his interactions with Cosmim and Renato, we focus on Cosmim in order to support an argument in which the past marks the present as a myth of formation that is structured below and beyond the logocentric presence. Renato, the third character, appears as a counterpoint at the end of the text just like in the novel, in other words, as a kind of venir for the future that could contradict all the logic established by the narrative until then. By leaving the conclusions open, the doubt that remains is the exact formulation of the future itself in its possibility of change, but not in its certainty. By balancing the hope of this with the immeasurability of Cosmim’s murder, what we end up with is perhaps a more negative assertiveness than a positive one.
An 'Earthly' Reading of Campos de Carvalho's A lua vem da Ásia
This paper aims to interpret the configuration of space in the 1956 novel A lua vem da Ásia, by Campos de Carvalho. In order to do so, I read the novel in an ‘earthly’ fashion, that is to say, I take heed of the manner in which its social and historical context contributes to the configuration of its spatial aspects. This course of action is in stark contrast to most interpretations of the novel, which read it from the perspective of its mad, lunatic narrator. The interpretation I propose here draws particularly on the concept of deterritorialization as employed by sociologist Renato Ortiz. It leads to construe the status of space in the novel as being de-centralized or mondialized. In this spatial configuration, the travelling narrator also becomes a ‘citizen of the world’ in the sense that he no longer needs to travel to find the same objects: they come to him. This configuration dissolves dichotomies such as East/West, North/South, and native/foreigner, which affects the way the narrator sees the world – and himself. I conclude that, if the space in the narrative can be interpreted as conditioned by the narrator’s ‘madness’, by his ‘mystical facet’ and/or by his ‘gnostic sensibility’, an alternative or complementary factor of this conditioning is the social and historical process of mundialization, observable in the phenomenon of deterritorialization, which appears in the novel, albeit in a hyperbolized manner, artistically and aesthetically modified.
Copyright (c) 2025 Arthur Barboza Ferreira
This article aims to look at Marocas, the main character of Machado de Assis’ short story “Singular ocorrência” (published in 1883 on the newspaper Gazeta de Notícias and later in 1884 on the collection Histórias sem data), and analyse how the character escapes both the ideals of the reformed prostitute, adopted by the romantics, and the vision of an incorrigible fallen woman, so dear to the realists. The paper also includes a comparison between Marocas’ journey and those of the protagonists from two of the plays mentioned in Machado’s narrative: The lady of the camellias, written by Alexandre Dumas Fils, and Olympe’s marriage, written by Émile Augier.
the prostitute on 18th century literature
Copyright (c) 2025 Luiza Helena Damiani Aguilar
Original Communities and Cartoneros Books
This paper researches the production of artisan books made of discarded cardboard covers, known as “cartoneros books”, a practice developed by cartoneras publishers, and explores the work of gathering, transcripting and bookbinding narratives from three communities originally from the state of Mato Grosso, aiming to analyze the relationship between the body and writing. We used the writings of Krauss (2024) and Krauss and Llera (2023) to describe the territory of cartoneros books. Using Certeau (2014) and Schierloh (2021), we tried to understand the link between the body and writing in the context of the production of artisan books, based on the founding narratives of the indigenous mato-grossense peoples. Based on Benjamin (2012), we talk about the narrator of the oral tradition who becomes a writing body in the weaving of cartoneros books. Finally, the article discusses the meeting of the practice of carton production with the school of one of the original communities of the state of Mato Grosso, the Escola Municipal Isolada de Educação Básica (EMIEB) de Cravari, situated in the Cravari village, owned by the Manoki people, with the development of the project entitled: “Indigenous Cartonera”.
Copyright (c) 2025 Flavia Krauss, Alexandre Mariotto Botton
This paper proposes a reading of the poem breve ensaio contra minha indiferença à cracolândia do jacaré, by Tatiana Pequeno, considering it as a sign of a reconfiguration of the idea of community in contemporary Brazilian poetry. In the face of current social and democratic crises, literature has been attempting to rethink the common, presenting itself as a means of reforming its consensualist and immunitarian conceptions. In this sense, breve ensaio introduces elements of such crises, revealing Pequeno's effort to engage with the intrusion of otherness into everyday life. How should one receive it? And further: what happens when the Other refuses this invitation to the communal? By combining a reading of the poem with Roland Barthes' notion of idiorrhythmy, this analysis ends up showing poetry's ability to invent new modes of coexistence, reaffirming its political potency.
KRENAK, Ailton. Um rio um pássaro. Rio de Janeiro: Dantes Editora, 2023.
Ailton Krenak é um dos mais influentes pensadores indígenas contemporâneos, reconhecido por suas reflexões sobre os direitos dos povos originários, o meio ambiente e a relação entre humanidade e natureza. Nascido em 1953, na aldeia Krenak, às margens do Rio Doce, em Minas Gerais, pertence ao povo Krenak, etnia que historicamente sofreu os impactos da colonização, da marginalização social e da destruição de suas terras.
Copyright (c) 2025 Rodrigo Felipe Veloso
Silences break in Letters to my mother, by Teresa Cárdenas
Amid an arena of daily confrontations, being a woman involves encountering the construction of categories, with gender being the most prominent in defining her experience (Connell; Pearse, 2019). Understood as a social structure, the category of gender is permeated by discourses, ideologies, and dominations arising from social and political technologies, producing, as one of its consequences, silences. This control mechanism is used, for example, to establish power hierarchies, create categories of repression and oppression, or sometimes silence marginal voices that have the capacity to break the unspeakable, transforming the tolerable into the intolerable (Solnit, 2017). Based on this premise, this article aims to understand the rupture of silences and silencing in the work Cartas para a minha mãe by Teresa Cárdenas (2021). Throughout the narrative, there is the sharing of both pain and fears and family silences, wich drive the character to your breakup, a process made possible through the writing of her diary-letters. In light of this, based on a bibliographic research approach with qualitative and exploratory features, it is necessary to refer to scholars such as Lauretis (2019), hooks (2021), Piedade (2017), Gonzalez (2020), Fanon (2008), among others. Therefore, the understanding of the rupture of silences imposed on the self-diegetic narrator through her writing and the discovery of a community originating from the sharing of pain and experiences throughout the narrative becomes evident.
Copyright (c) 2025 Maria Beatriz Ferreira Santos, Algemira De Macedo Mendes
Literature, authoritarianism and human rights in current Argentine literature, the case of Ganarse la muerte, by Griselda Gambaro
Ganarse la muerte was written between 1974 and 1975, being published in 1976 by Ediciones de la Flor: the very year in which the coup d’état took place. Lieutenant Colonel Jorge Méndez of the SIDE wrote a detailed report on this novel, for which it was banned in April 1977 by decree of the military junta. This article sets out to analyse how Griselda Gambaro highlights the political, social and epistemological violence exercised by the discourse and procedures of censorship during this dictatorship, incarnating it in the woman/homeland. Similarly, as Nelly Richard argues with regard to feminist epistemologies, this fiction promotes ‘new forms of political subjectivity capable of intervening in the multiple power struggles that take place between bodies, practices and institutions’ (2008, p. 8, our translation) and question the possibility of a general form of knowledge, attacking its supposed neutrality (Alcoff; Potter, 1993), without distorting the objects of knowledge due to ignorance, false propositions or invalid arguments (Haraway, 1995), as has so often been argued.
Copyright (c) 2025 Marcela Crespo Buiturón
This article discusses the novella No fue penal: una jugada en dos tiempos (2023) by Mexican writer and researcher Juan Villoro, focusing on the antagonistic construction of the two protagonists, El Tanque (football coach) and Valeriano (video referee). The analysis highlights how each character experiences the game in a distinct way: the former linked to a sonic ordering of reality, and the latter to a videocentric paradigm. To this end, this study integrates football theorists such as José Miguel Wisnik (2008) and Luiz Henrique Toledo (2002), with bibliographical references on voice and body in Latin American literature, including Ángel Rama (1985) and Cornejo Polar (2000), Leda Maria Martins (2021), and Aguilar and Cámara (2017).
Copyright (c) 2025 Paulo Benites, Cristiano de Sales, Prisca Agustoni, Lucia Teninna
Based on the opposition between parasitic forms and critical geminations, from the essay “Coro contra coros: a tecnologia parasitária & as formas geminadas de fabulação”, by Flora Süssekind (2022), we deepen the dialogue between literary theory and biology, suggested by the metaphors in the title, and propose the concepts of “viral” and “marginal” guided by currents in biology that work with the notion of semiosis as constitutive of living beings, to analyze different modes of collective formation in contemporary Brazilian culture, as they would present themselves in the experience of slam poetry, produced at the intersection between the streets and schools of urban peripheries. The article concludes with the interpretation of two performances – “Fanta” by poet Márcio Ricardo and “Profecia” by Kimani – aiming to understand how each of them allows itself to be contaminated by the diction and discourse typical of neo-Pentecostal preachers, producing different critical, rhetorical, and political effects.
Copyright (c) 2025 Fabio Roberto Lucas, Marcella Faria
The indigenous Anacaona represents a symbol of resilience and female leadership of the Taíno people. For resisting the forces of colonization that were eroding her ethnicity, she was executed, condemned to hanging for insurgence and rebellion, by the Spanish colonizers who arrived in the America continent with Christopher Columbus, in 1492. However, records about this historical figure and her people are scarce in the European hegemonic traditional historiography. It is within the literary universe that her figure finds space to be redefined in response to the historical erasure to which she was subjected. In this article, we present our comparative analysis of the fictional construction of this character in the uncritical historical novel Flor de Oro (Anacaona, Reina de Jaragua) (1860), by Francisco José Orellana, and the critical historical novel Anacaona: la última princesa del Caribe (2017) by Jordi Díez Rojas. To this end, we rely on scholars such as Celia Fernández Prieto (2003) and Fleck (2017) for theoretical support regarding the different modalities of the historical novel. Regarding the decolonial studies, we draw on Mignolo (2017). Additionally, we reference authors such as Martínez Miguélez (1994) and Federici (2017) concerning the role of women in society. Through our analysis, we demonstrate examples of the ideologizations constructed around the image of this indigenous woman over the centuries. We also emphasize the importance of bringing to light characters obscured by traditional historiography, granting them space in contemporary literature and, consequently, in the collective imaginary of Latin American society, which remains deeply rooted in coloniality-driven thought.
Copyright (c) 2025 Tatiane Cristina Becher, Gilmei Francisco Fleck
The present paper analyses “A quinta história”, by Clarice Lispector, as well as its translations into English and Spanish: “The fifth story” and “La quinta historia”, respectively. The central objective was to analyse the lexicon of greater keyness in the short story and to contrast this lexicon with two versions of the Claricean short story translated abroad. To achieve this goal, theoretical-methodological procedures cover Translation Studies in connection with Corpus Linguistics. From statistical data and the establishment of the keyword “baratas” as a lexical unit of greater keyness (and, similarly, “cockroaches” and “cucarachas”, in the translations), a qualitative analysis is presented in which the symbolic use of the cockroach, portrayed as representative of evil in the tale analysed, particularly; partially extending the analyses to the Claricean literature in general. Regarding the translations, the results illustrate that translators’ lexical choices can lead to diverse readings in contrast to the text in Portuguese.
Copyright (c) 2025 João Vitor de Paula Souza
This article explores the complexity of cultural translation through the analysis of the folklore figures Mormó from Greek mythology and Cuca from Brazilian folklore. By comparing these entities, the interactions between cultural traditions and gender representations are discussed. The study reveals that both characters are used as pedagogical tools to control children’s behavior, reflecting social norms about motherhood. By considering the similarities and differences between Greek and Brazilian cultures, a translation that respects and values the original cultural contexts is proposed. The suggested translation for μορμολύκεια finds its point of contact with the folkloric Cuca, highlighting the need for intercultural dialogue to enrich literary and popular traditions.
Copyright (c) 2025 Leonardo Guimarães, Gabriele Cornelli
This article seeks to understand how the notion of heterodiscourse, originating from Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of the novel, is articulated in Roberto Schwarz’s critical work on Machado de Assis. To do this, we will analyze some excerpts from important essays by the critic about the author, taking into account the type of argumentation used in direct dealing with the literary text. It is also proposed to question how this type of analysis is combined with the theoretical framework that appears most frequently in the work of the critic from São Paulo, namely, the tradition of Frankfurt critical theory. As a conclusion, we discuss the possibilities of bringing these two theoretical matrices closer together for literary analysis.
Copyright (c) 2025 Filipe de Freitas Gonçalves
The becoming of the body in a lacerating pendulum game
The research discussed the work Hospício é Deus – Diário I, by Maura Lopes Cançado, an author who has been little studied and often kept in invisibility, with the aim of highlighting the profound connection that the book presents with the notion of the body. Based on this scenario, reflections on the ideas of metaphor, grounded in the writing of Susan Sontag, and metonymy, supported by Jacques Derrida’s concept of différance, were used as guidelines to investigate the notion of the body in the diary. The hypothesis considered was that the link between the body and the writing of memory in Cançado’s work is established through a mirroring relationship between these two fields.
The poet Roberto Piva (1937-2010), in Paranoia, his debut work, published in 1963, takes a nocturnal journey through the marginal environments of São Paulo, transforming the city into a dreamlike space where desire reigns. In Paranoia, the night emerges as a place of transgression, excess, and sensuality. The desiring gaze of Piva’s poetic voice transforms the universe around him into a vertiginous stage for processions of marginalized beings, inhabitants of the city’s underworld, among whom the poet mingles in orgiastic communion. Piva’s wandering through the night of São Paulo can be understood as a poetic of cruising, as theorist Jack Parlett (2022) proposed in his book The Poetics of Cruising. For Parlett, the gaze and imagination shape the encounters between strangers in the urban queer universe. In this play of gazes, the author sees a theater of poses performed and directed at a voyeuristic gaze. Based on Parlett and other authors who explore the urban experience from a queer point of view, this work aims to pursue the traces of cruising in Piva’s urban lyric, trying to show how this production poetically stages the erotic game of poses and looks so dear to cruising through the poetic voice transit through the nocturnal underworld of São Paulo in the 60s.
Copyright (c) 2025 Rangel Gomes de Andrade