CALL FOR PAPERS O Eixo e a Roda – v. 34, n.4 (oct. - dec. 2025) Dossier: Forms of the collective in modern and contemporary Brazilian literature

CALL FOR PAPERS O Eixo e a Roda – v. 34, n.4 (oct. - dec. 2025) Dossier: Forms of the collective in modern and contemporary Brazilian literature

Organizes:

Rebeca Errázuriz-Cruz (Centro de Estudios Americanos, Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez)

Fábio Roberto Lucas (PUC-SP)

Jorge Manzi (Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile)

Deadline for submission of proposals: April 15^th, 2025

This dossier aims to constitute a broad field of reflection on the links between forms of the literary, the collective and the political in 20th and 21st century Brazilian literature, bringing together and contrasting two historical milestones, one modern and the other contemporary. To use an image from Antonio Candido in “A revolução de 30 e a cultura” (The revolution of the 1930s and culture), we would say that both the political and social reforms of the Estado Novo and the re-democratization that ushered in the New Republic in the 1980s constitute a kind of vortex of historical experiences, which in a spiral collects social, political and artistic dilemmas from previous decades in order to process them and “arrange them in a new configuration”. Between the construction of the modern state and Brazil's insertion into globalization, the industrial-developmentalist pacts and neoliberal currency without ballast, modern mass society on a national scale and contemporary social forms crossed by multiple scales (including that of the nation), this dossier seeks to interrogate the ways in which literary form interacts with these socio-political transformations, with an emphasis on the idea of collectivity.

The dossier will focus on discussing the tensions and difficulties that have characterized the figuration of the collective in Brazilian literature from modernity to the present, difficulties that are already evident in the montages and in the strong heteroglossia of the modernism of 22 and its developments, reaching the unbridled and choral forms that, according to Flora Süssekind, broke out in the most ambitious literature of the New Republic. As if, returning to Rodrigo Naves' terms, the figuration of the collective in Brazilian literature always required dealing with the "difficulty of form", linked to the challenge of accounting for its heterogeneities, antagonisms and violences, and, at the same time, its utopian horizons and potentialities. This results in works that, in Süssekind's view, often “does not presuppose (...) a community, but, on the contrary, its ‘perpetual questioning’, ‘the perpetual working of its limits’”. The dossier will therefore welcome papers that offer new analyses, interpretations and perspectives to reflect on the complexity of figurating the collective in modern or contemporary Brazilian literature, considering procedures such as montage, collage, fragmentation, heteroglossia, choral forms, among others, whether in prose, poetry or theater. Papers with an intermedial orientation (literature and other arts) or a comparative orientation with other (non-Brazilian) literary traditions are also welcome.