Brecht, Saramago e Buzetto - espacialidades políticas do medo e do mal

Abstract

While materialist criticism tends to resist acknowledging the Gothic and relegates it to the status of sub-literature, many Marxist writers have utilized terror and horror to fictionalize the cultural fear stemming from various forms of oppression. In the 20th century, characterized by the rise, institutionalization, and spread of Nazism and fascism throughout the West, several authors sought a reconciliation between the material and transcendent/supernatural dimensions of life to aesthetically establish their investigations into the collective imagination. In this article, we will seek to highlight the ways in which three works utilized the locus horribilis, the monstrous character, and the returning past – formal structures of Gothic literature – to denounce social oppression dramatically, lyrically, and narratively: Terror e miséria do Terceiro Reich, by Bertolt Brecht; O ano de 1993, by José Saramago; and Conturbado, by Marco Buzetto. It will be demonstrated how the spatialization of terror and horror adapted to different cultures and genres to preserve their effects and enhance them as a pervasive structure of unresolved feelings in historical dimensions.