XII CONGRESSO INTERNACIONAL ABRALIC

XII CONGRESSO INTERNACIONAL ABRALIC

Resumo:264-1

Oral (Tema Livre)

264-1	From deprivation to utopia: some thoughts on Marge Piercy
Autores:	Elton Furlanetto (USP - Universidade de São Paulo)

Resumo

Several critics have pointed out the importance of literature and the arts in general to the constitution of our subjectivities. If this is so, along with the fruition of art, there is also a pedagogical aspect which should not be overlooked. Literature teaches us how to behave, how to observe the social norms and conform to them. It ultimately teaches us how to feel, as it is both directed to our reason and to our senses. Normally, ideology encapsulates these (conscious or more often unconscious) lessons so that art ends up providing the reader with images of what is right or wrong, models they can follow (or sometimes) criticize. In a world dominated by an impression that “the historic alternatives to capitalism have been proven unviable and impossible, and that no other socio-economic system is conceivable, let alone practically available” (Fredric Jameson), the authors who oppose such a view are rare. The American author and poet Marge Piercy seems to be one of them. Taking some of her characters as instances she created in order to debate some contemporary issues, we can grasp that 1) most of them come from deprived backgrounds and move from this toward an awareness-raising process; 2) such process is not easy and involves losses and fights; and also 3) although most of her main characters are women, she tries to establish a new type of self-conscious and historical human being, who somehow militate for a society with less inequities (as Piercy has been doing herself for most part of her life). It is exactly this militancy (and its obstacles and potentialities) she takes from her socialist and feminist background to the aesthetic realm of her poetry and fiction which will be central to our reading and comments here of two of her novels: Going Down Fast (1969) and Woman on the Edge of Time (1976). We intend to discuss how her two novels serve as “spaces of hope” (David Harvey), places for resisting passivity and conformity and how the experiences she was giving a form to in the 1970’s could be valuable in the context of a political lethargy in a country like Brazil in the early 21st century.

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