Literature and media time

Abstract

From the exam of values of our modernity, when the technical imagination starts to outline, in form and content, literary narratives enthusiastic of the present time and the life accelerated by the machine (notoriously the cinematograph), this paper aims at analyzing the way the media environment is nowadays appropriated by some Brazilian literature texts, the mimetic movement of which in view of media language devices reveals no longer a philoneist appeal – as during the Belle Époque –, but an anti-utopia of the culture of speed and accumulation. This work examines, mainly in texts by Moacir Scliar, Luiz Ruffato and Michel Melamed, registers of a literary time characterized by immediateness, simultaneousness, fl uidity and programmability illusion, which allows the narrators and other literary subjects temporal advancements and returns, symptoms of mnemonic obssession Displayed in the intempestive structure of hybrid literary forms – in which speed and conciseness are results of a search for an intense and remarkable construction –, the electronic and digital media’s “real time” is revealed, in some of these texts, as a technical and marketable strategy, where the vertiginous life becomes, aimlessly, a process of anesthetic substitution.