: Caio Yurgel
: Landscape's Revenge The ecology of failure in Robert Walser and Bernardo Carvalho
: Walter de Gruyter GmbH& Co.KG
: 9783110617580
: Latin American Literatures in the World / Literaturas Latinoamericanas en el MundoISSN
: 1
: CHF 0.50
:
: Romanische Sprachwissenschaft / Literaturwissenschaft
: English
: 264
: Wasserzeichen
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: PDF

Landscape, as it appears and is described throughout the works of Bernardo Carvalho and Robert Walser, provides an excellent-yet virtually unexplored-pathway to the authors' literary projects.

The landscape functions here as a synthetic and unifying figure that triggers, at first, through the analysis of its description per se, the main and most evident elements of the authors' works. However, when sustained as a methodological figure beyond the scope of its own description, the landscape soon reveals a darker, far more fascinating and far less explored side of the authors' oeuvres: a vengeful, seemingly defeatist resentment against the status quo, which gives way to the more latent and biting elements of the authors' prose, such as irony, the unheimlich, an anti-heroic agenda, the apocalyptic aesthetics of a disaster-prone fictional world, as well as an understanding of history and literature through the figures of failure and marginality.

By drawing from diverse critical traditions from Latin-America and Europe, this comparative text seeks to unravel, in all of its complexity and scope, the fictional stage upon which Walser's and Carvalho's characters narrate, with their dying breath, a world that is slowly undoing itself.



Caio Yurgel, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany / Peking University, China.