Rio de Janeiro, apocalyptic and posthuman metropolis
A reading of Rubem Fonseca’s short story “o quarto selo (fragmento)”
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.21814/2i.2660Keywords:
spatiality; metropolis; apocalypse; post-human; Rubem Fonseca.Abstract
In an interdisciplinary approach, in which the theory of literature and space science intervene, this article examines the representation of Rio de Janeiro in Rubem Fonseca’s short story “O quarto selo (fragmento)”. Set in an indeterminate future, the tale uses the technique of cinematographic plans to describe a new urban reality, in which the spaces of late modernity are replaced by a metropolis formed by peripheries. At a time when bodies, machines and cities are mutually constitutive, the presence of the cyborg character alludes to the dissemination of hybrid identities in the context of a posthuman geography. The protagonist of the story is precisely an artificial creation, endowed with multiple identities, in the ordered and managed world of Rio de Janeiro understood as an apocalyptic metropolis. The apocalypse, to which the title of the story refers, must be understood as a device that projects a catastrophic scenario in the immediate reality, allowing questions of a social and political order to be thought and discussed.
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