Landscape's Revenge - The ecology of failure in Robert Walser and Bernardo Carvalho

Landscape, as it appears and is described throughout the works of Bernardo Carvalho and Robert Walser, provides an excellent-yet virtually unexplored-pathway to the authors' literary projects.
The landscape functions here as a synthetic and unifying figure that triggers, at first, through the analysis of its description per se, the main and most evident elements of the authors' works. However, when sustained as a methodological figure beyond the scope of its own description, the landscape soon reveals a darker, far more fascinating and far less explored side of the authors' oeuvres: a vengeful, seemingly defeatist resentment against the status quo, which gives way to the more latent and biting elements of the authors' prose, such as irony, the unheimlich, an anti-heroic agenda, the apocalyptic aesthetics of a disaster-prone fictional world, as well as an understanding of history and literature through the figures of failure and marginality.
By drawing from diverse critical traditions from Latin-America and Europe, this comparative text seeks to unravel, in all of its complexity and scope, the fictional stage upon which Walser's and Carvalho's characters narrate, with their dying breath, a world that is slowly undoing itself.

About the author

Caio Yurgel, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany / Peking University, China.

Product details

• Authors: Caio Yurgel
• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 08.11.2018
• EAN: 9783110617573
• ISBN: 978-3-11-061757-3
• No. of pages: 256
• Dimensions: 155 mm x 22 mm x 230 mm
• Weight: 499 g
• Series: Latin American Literatures in the World. Literaturas Latinoamericanas en el Mundo; Latin American Literatures in the World / Literaturas Latinoamericanas en el Mundo; Latin American Literatures in the World. Literaturas Latinoamericanas en el Mundo; ISSN
• Subject: Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > General and comparative linguistics