Transmutações em Rubem Fonseca

Abstract

This work aims to bring Rubem Fonseca's writings from the early years of the 21st century into the academic debate, seeking to contrast them with his literary production from the last four decades of the 20th century. Thus, in this work, we intend to develop the thesis that the love relationships present in 21st-century literature are reactions to loneliness, violence, and the excessively exploited, unrestrained sex of postmodernism. The return of humanism in personal relationships, the encounter with the other, and the realization that someone exists beside oneself is reflected in literature through a conception of love as something sublimated. According to David Harvey (1993), postmodernism underwent a profound alteration in the structure of feeling, "denouncing all ornament as crime, all individualism as sentimentalism, and all romanticism as kitsch" (p. 45). This change was reflected in the literary productions of the late 20th century and is declining in the 21st century, as we will demonstrate in this proposed research. Regarding postmodernism, Jean Baudrillard (2006:125) tells us: Hegemony puts an end to domination. We internalize the world order and its operational apparatus, of which we are hostages rather than slaves. Consensus, voluntary or involuntary, replaces good old servitude. If domination involved an authoritarian system of positive values, contemporary hegemony, on the contrary, involves a symbolic liquidation of all values. The transformations that have occurred in the field of values result in a literature in which affections are not in vogue. These values, emptied in postmodernism, now regain their place and permeate the pages of the works analyzed in this study. In this sense, exploring the theme of love in Rubem Fonseca's works makes us reflect on the anguish and loneliness present in these unstable times, in which everything, even love relationships, fades into uncertainty.