[DOWNLOAD] "Aesthetics and Ideology in Queiros's A Cidade E As Serras (Critical Essay)" by CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture # Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Aesthetics and Ideology in Queiros's A Cidade E As Serras (Critical Essay)
- Author : CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
- Release Date : January 01, 2009
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 90 KB
Description
In 1888 Eca de Queiros describes Paris as the capital of Europe. According to the author, rather than the city of light, Paris was a metropolis "reduced to a Corinth, where there will always be enough foreign money, where courtesans will climb to the altar and where the stomach will be glorified" ("reduzida a uma Corinto, onde sempre havera dinheiro estrangeiro em abundancia, as cortesas subirao aos altares, o estomago tera a sua gloria") (Notas 212; unless indicated otherwise, all translations are mine). In Paris, the whole of Europe becomes a public stage, a space where the impulse to be truly European is replaced by a pantomime. In another text from 1892 entitled "A Europa em Resumo" ("Europe Summarized") Eca depicts Europe, the navel of the world, as a stage: "In our globe, Europe is the most enticing of public theaters." ("A Europa e, no nosso globo, o mais delicioso dos teatros publicos" [Notas 264]). The author is referring to a liveless theater, enervated by the culture of a capitalist society. The courtesan, bringing together pleasure and money, is the social character that best represents the human type produced by the capitalist division of labor in Modernity. The Old World's loss of vitality to a point where it can be "summarized" means that the only possible way to behold it is through an estranged gaze that moves from the periphery to the center, a gaze that, being self-critical, remains nevertheless a Eurocentric one. In the Queirosian reflection on Europe, the American continent emerges as one of the spaces where one is able to distance oneself from a decadent Europe: "In fact, in order to enjoy our interesting Europe without disappointment, we need to be far away, in Texas, or somewhere else overseas. As far as I am concerned, it would be ideal to live, for instance, in Brazil, (as soon as they have some order and public reasoning over there) under a sky that, unlike ours, does not have the melancholy and the weight of a cloudy ceiling." ("De facto, para saborear sem desilusao esta tao interessante Europa, e necessario estarmos longe, no Texas--ou em algum lugar, alem mar. O ideal, desde o meu ponto de vista, seria viver, por exemplo, no Brasil (no momento en que haja ai un pouco de ordem e de juizo publico), sob um ceu que nao tenha, como o nosso, o peso e a melancolia de um tecto nublado" [Notas 266]). It is under this melancholic mood that Queiros portrays Europe as a theater. The problem resides in the centre and not in the margins of the world and the periphery functions as a natural place to recover one's taste for civilization. Europe remains what is most interesting and instigating but, in order to enjoy it, it is necessary to change one's location. In the peripheries, untouched by the historical becoming of Modernity, one can find a place from which to overcome the negativity inherent in civilization.