Two fables of city: urban space configurations in Bernardo Carvalho and João Cabral de Melo Neto

Abstract

The aim of this article is to present some conside­rations on the contemporary city figurativizations, from the reading of “O Arquiteto”, a Bernardo Carvalho’s short story, published in the anthology “Aberração” (2004). In this short story, the writer retakes the city theme following a modernity tradi­tion, established, among others, by Poe and Bau­delaire, making his voice embrace other Brazilian writers voices, that have represented the town, but, at the same time, recreating, in his scripture body, dense and intense, quick and, in some sense, ago­nic, the utopist projects of renascence ideal cities, questioning the utopias and the aesthetics traces which can be found on the nowadays texts. To enlarge the metalinguistic proposal that emerges from the analysis, some poems by João Cabral de Melo Neto are considered. This comparison allow us to establish parameters to think about influence in certain perspective of contemporary literature, which epicenter configures less the supremacy of the newty and more a aesthetic of deletions of the origins, tracks, traces, which are possible by the canon invention.