Abstract
Author(s): Brock, Ashley | Abstract: Shellhorse, Adam Joseph. Anti-Literature: The Politics and Limits of Representation in Modern Brazil and Argentina. U of Pittsburgh Press, 2017. 264 pp.
Highlights
Tracing an intellectual history that runs from Oswald de Andrade’s Manifesto Antropófago (1928), through the debates about Sartrean commitment on the pages of Contorno in the 1950’s, through Ángel Rama’s Transculturación narrativa (1982), through the emergence of subaltern studies in the 1990’s, to Jon Beasley-Murray’s Post-hegemony (2010), Shellhorse challenges a predominant narrative, which understands Latin American literature as a representational project whose success in aesthetic as well as political terms lies in articulating the specificity of Latin American identity
The modern Brazilian and Argentine texts Shellhorse presents as case studies of anti-literature self-consciously engage with their generic conventions, their media specificity, and their inescapably mediated nature in order to lay bare their status as constructed cultural objects and to interrogate the limits of the literary
Through the lucid historical account he provides of the relationship between the two movements, Shellhorse locates the often-missed political intervention of concrete poetry in its abandonment of lyrical subjectivity in order to participate in extra-poetic systems such as advertising and pop culture by “devouring” them (77)
Summary
Anti-Literature: The Politics and Limits of Representation in Modern Brazil and Argentina. “Anti-literature” is the term Shellhorse gives to experimental texts that make space for previously excluded perspectives within literature not by mimetically representing historically marginalized experiences but, rather, by self-reflexively questioning the limits of literature as a representational regime.
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