The Opaque Experience: Literature and Disenchantment

Abstract

The book reconstructs artists and writers positions against the backdropof the disenchantment with conventional forms of art and critiquethrough art. The transgression of boundaries, the demand for bodily participation,the transformation of the spectator into a participant, wereall strategies that dissolved the separation between audience and artist,transforming the relationship between culture and politics.In particular, I examine a select corpus of texts from the 1970s and1980s that offer invaluable insights on a new concept of experience. Artisticworks of the period are traversed by an experiential drive that exceeds artisticform. Insisting obsessively on coming close to experience, experiencenever assumes the form of knowledge; rather, it is conceived as the space ofignorance and fantasy. By analyzing works by Silviano Santiago, Juan JoséSaer, Clarice Lispector, Ana Cristina César, and Nestor Perlongher, amongothers, the book analyzes the blossoming of subjectivity, the emergence ofmarginal poetry, the abundance of hybrid forms and of amphibious texts within the gray area between reality and fiction.