Anti-Literature: The Politics and Limits of Representation in Modern Brazil and Argentina by Adam Joseph Shellhorse

Abstract

Reviewed by: Anti-Literature: The Politics and Limits of Representation in Modern Brazil and Argentina by Adam Joseph Shellhorse Patrick Thomas Ridge Shellhorse, Adam Joseph. Anti-Literature: The Politics and Limits of Representation in Modern Brazil and Argentina. Pittsburgh: U Pittsburgh P, 2017. 258 pp. ISBN: 978-08-2296-447-6. Anti-Literature offers an important contribution to the field of Latin American studies. Critical analyses of what Shellhorse deems "anti-literature"—multidisciplinary and minoritarian writings that emphasize affect and perception over representation—aim to reconceptualize the idea of Latin American literature. As Shellhorse further explains, the anti-literary text "recaptures form as an assemblage of expression, an interplay between media, that effectuates subversions of the sensible" (194). Case studies demonstrate how these works from Brazil and Argentina—this includes the visual arts, concrete poetics, and film scripts, among others—experiment with form to express their subaltern, feminine, and political dimensions, thus countering the region's historical state-centered and identitarian literary projects. Furthermore, the volume's heightened focus on Brazilian writers, as well as critical dialogue with the field's most influential theories, call for a more interdisciplinary and inter-American understanding of regional literature. From the outset, Shellhorse examines Clarice Lispector's A hora da estrela (1977), suggesting that the anti-literary text distances itself from traditional regimes of representation by exploring the writing of subalternity and the feminine. Accompanying these observations, facsimiles of the author's manuscript illuminate her subversive compositional mode. Next, Anti-Literature shifts its attention to Argentina's David Viñas, emphasizing the role of affect and cinema in his hybrid work Dar la cara (1962). Screenshots from José Martínez Suárez's film adaptation advance Shellhorse's argument surrounding Viñas's radicalized medium and montage narrative technique. A substantial part of the analysis considers the anti-literary tendencies of Brazil's concrete poets, a notably understudied chapter of the region's literature. Different from the existing scholarship that underscores the identitarian framework of Oswald de Andrade's anthropophagia, Shellhorse redirects critical attention to the cannibalistic poetics that employ "a powerful syntactic and sensory sabotage of the discursive codes of official culture" (71). Once more, readings and visuals of works by Andrade, as well as Haroldo de Campos, Décio Pignatari, and Augusto de Campos, demonstrate, as Shellhorse posits, how the concrete poets created a "multimedial defiance of representational logic" (71). The study concludes with extensive analyses of Osman Lins's "Retábulo de Santa Joana Carolina" (1966) and Haroldo de Campos's "O anjo esquerdo da história" (1996). Reinforcing his main thesis, Shellhorse argues that the texts' subaltern elements and experimental form complicate dominant understandings of Latin American literature. Accordingly, the study highlights Lins's cannibalization of baroque ornamentation to narrate the violence of subalternity in the Brazilian Northeast. A convincing reading of Campo's revolutionary poem, inspired by the Eldorado dos Carajás massacre, notes the experimental use of language combined with subaltern affect. Paired with images of the MST occupation taken by Sebastião [End Page 166] Salgado, one of Brazil's most renowned— and, at times controversial—photographers, Shellhorse dissects Campos's manipulation of typography and punctuation to produce a sensorial experience of this struggle that challenges the official discourse of the State. By focusing on experimental countertraditions, particularly the Brazilian avantgarde, Anti-Literature adds a new layer to Latin American criticism. Shellhorse's study not only sparks new discussion surrounding Brazilian and Spanish American literature, but its combination of close readings and engagement with current literary theory offers an innovative interdisciplinary formula for future textual analyses. Patrick Thomas Ridge Virginia Tech Copyright © 2019 Department of Romance Languages, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill