Mester

This paper examines how Invenção de Orfeu by Jorge de Lima rewrites the Western canon through postcolonial and archipelagic poetics. Reading Édouard Glissant’s concepts of Opacity and Relation alongside Antonio Cornejo Polar’s notion of Heterogeneity, it argues that Lima’s formal fragmentation and postcolonial reframing of the epic desacralize the Orphic myth, subvert literary traditions, and remap Brazil’s colonial tensions. Taken together, intertextuality, metapoetics, and island imagery enable Lima to challenge imperial cartographies and to allegorize the ambivalent quest for identity within coloniality. In doing so, Invenção de Orfeu unsettles colonial imaginaries and aesthetic epistemes through mythic and literary reinvention.