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9780911198980 Academic Inspection Copy

Retired Dreams

Dom Casmurro, Myth and Modernity
  • ISBN-13: 9780911198980
  • Publisher: PURDUE UNIVERSITY PRESS
    Imprint: PURDUE UNIVERSITY PRESS
  • Price: AUD $78.99
  • Stock: 0 in stock
  • Availability: This book is temporarily out of stock, order will be despatched as soon as fresh stock is received.
  • Local release date: 29/12/1989
  • Format: Paperback 150 pages Weight: 333g
  • Categories: Literary studies: general [DSB]
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Retired Dreams discusses Machado de Assis's Dom Casmurro,Brazil's greatest novel and one of the little-recognized masterpieces of allthe America's. Published precisely at the turn of the century, Dom Casmurro canbe considered a literary milestone, giving the last word on the tradition ofthe realistic bourgeois novel and opening the door to the preoccupations ofcontemporary writers. The book is pervaded by a sense of change; its narrator/protagonistseems caught between a primitive mentality of archetype and a consciousness ofthe transitory modern world. Retired Dreams exploresthis tension. Dixon identifies the quest myth, highly displaced, as theunderlying narrative model and the shaper of the narrator's thinking. Hedevotes separate chapters to the function of time, to the rebirth motif, therole of matriarchy and patriarchy, the voyage motif and woman as anima, andsymbols and primitivism. Particular attention is given to the role of the majortropes (metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony) as devices permitting boththe connection and the distancing between the tradition of heroic discourse andthe domesticated, unheroic reality of the novel's characters. Through thisrhetorical-mythic lens, the book examines many of the factors that havecontinued to fascinate both general readers and critics - the work's ambiguousplot and characterization its problematic ideology its self-conscious artistryand its cosmic vision.
Paul B. Dixon is the author of Reversible Reading: Ambiguity in Four Modern Latin American Novels, and articles in a number of American and Latin American journals.
". . . places a long overdue emphasis on the value of knowledge gained from myth criticism and reflects a more holistic approach to literary studies. . . . Retired Dreams ought to be required reading for students of the master, Machado de Assis." Rocky Mountain Review "[Dixon's] keen observations and manipulations of the materials allow us to find the necessary correspondence with the mythic discourse despite the considerable 'displacement' required . . . his text benefits from complementary topics that, taken as a whole, constitute a highly laudable contribution." Choice "The multiplicity of aspects of the novel that [Dixon] shows to be susceptible to this approach is impressive." --Keith Ellis "[Dixon] not only reveals a penetrating knowledge of this novel and Machado de Assis's approach to fiction, but he also demonstrates control over a large body of varied critical material in areas ranging from general literary theory to psychological and cultural anthropology." --Irwin Stern
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