UCLA

In my dissertation, I analyze some problems raised by contemporary Latin-American (Mock-)epic narratives, both from Jorge Luis Borges’ (theoretical) perspective and through the reading of Macuna�ma (1928), from M�rio de Andrade. This dissertation is divided in two parts. In the first part, I elaborate a theory of the (Mock-)Epic through a review of several Jorge Luis Borges’s essays. In view of this context, I thus outline the main aims of my research, namely: a) to analyze the critical role of the epic narratives in the contemporary world; b) to analyze the Poetics of the contemporary epic narrative, that is, to question the form and the literary devices which make an epic narrative somehow effective. In the second part, I carry out a double-sided analysis of Macuna�ma. Firstly, as a reflection around two axes and respective articulation (the collective psychological Brazilian reality and the language used to express it), in order to understand what is specifically at stake in what concerns a possible epic feature found in Macuna�ma marked by protest and non-conformity. As follows, Macuna�ma is envisaged as: a) a dialogue with (medieval) literary traditions where the (mock-)epic discourse repeats its “original” forms and simultaneously, strays away from them; b) a literary work which satirically criticized the cultural and economical (neo)colonialism to which Brazil was (yet) subjugated in the early twentieth century, while destabilizing the rational, realistic and logical-positivist categories of colonial thought. In a second moment, in confrontation with a critical tradition which defends that Macuna�ma searches for and attempts to reach a homogeneity of a Brazilian identity, in service of M�rio de Andrade’s supposed nationalist program, the hypothesis for a different reading shall be considered. More specifically, the possibility that Macuna�ma opens up a vision of the Brazilian reality regarding cosmopolitanism, heterogeneity and the unknown, with the concepts of desire, eroticism, variable rhythm and childishness operating a dynamic articulation which leads to the production of Alterity.