When the Glass Slips: Building Bridges to Transmodern Identity in the Novels of Santiago Nazarian and Chico Buarque.

摘要

Elizabeth Bishop's poem "The Gentleman of Shalott" examines the essence of identity with a conventional literary device---a mirror---in a very unconventional way. Instead of using it to consider the outward, like Tennyson's famous lady whom the title references, the gentleman's questions of reality and space are turned inward, creating an isolated concept of self. Literature draws maps of fate in mirrors, formulating identity in the reflection. However, as the opposing techniques of the lady and gentleman of Shalott demonstrate, the degree of acceptance of the resulting imago can vary widely.;Like "The Gentleman of Shalott," the grand narrative fictions which preceded postmodernism sometimes deceive themselves with their own illusion. Instead of resolving tension, they perpetuate the link between myth and reality to such an extent that the mirror masks whatever is not consistent with its idealized symmetry. So what happens if, as Bishop speculates in her poem, "the glass slips?" After postmodernism brought grand narrative fictions crashing down, a self-referential identity like the gentleman's is no longer sustainable.;By analyzing the novels of Santiago Nazarian and Chico Buarque through a prism of critical perspectives including Jung, Bakhtin, and Zygmunt Bauman, this dissertation reveals a shifting, ever-changing organism of transmodern identity that does not attempt to reforge fictions from the broken mirror of postmodernism, but rather bridges the gaps between the shards, anchoring identity between multiplicity and interconnectivity. In Santiago Nazarian's work, particularly Olivio, A morte sem nome, and Feriado de mim mesmo, we follow Jung's concept of individuation through the climax of what he calls the transcendent function, culminating in the integration of the texts themselves in a transmodern labyrinth of intertextuality. The subsequent analysis of Chico Buarque's novels, principally Budapeste , demonstrates how Bakhtin's theories about accumulative identity through border crossing and the interaction of languages (heteroglossia) draw our gaze outward from postmodern hyper-reflexivity, locating the self through the resulting complex of reference points.