Retired Dreams: Dom Casmurro, Myth and Modernity

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Purdue University Press, 1989 - Literary Criticism - 150 pages

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.

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Contents

8
8
MYTH AND ITS TRANSFORMATIONS
15
THE ABOLITION OF TIME
33
Copyright

7 other sections not shown

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Retired Dreams: Dom Casmurro, Myth and Modernity
Paul B. Dixon
Snippet view - 1989
Retired Dreams: Dom Casmurro, Myth and Modernity
Paul B. Dixon
Snippet view - 1989

Common terms and phrases

adultery agora ambiguity Anatomy of Criticism anima archetypes Bentinho and Capitu Bento Bento Santiago boca Brás Cubas Brazilian C. G. Jung called Camões Capitu and Bentinho Casmurro céu chap chapter characters child death displaced Dom Casmurro dream duas Engenho Novo Escobar example Ezequiel father Fiction figurative Fuentes Glória Helen Caldwell heroic ilha implied important involving ironic irony jealousy José Dias Joseph Campbell Kermode Latin American literary literature livro Lusíadas Machado de Assis magical mão marriage marry matriarchal metaphor metonymy modern Moisés mother motifs myth criticism não narrative narrator naufrágio noite Northrop Frye Novels of Machado olhos de ressaca palavra patriarchal pessoa primeiro primitive Princeton promise protagonist quest myth reader realistic rebirth pattern Rio de Janeiro says Schüler sea voyage seems seminary sense sonhos sort story structure suggests synecdoche tempo tends tion tradition trans transformation underlying undertow undertow eyes University Press vida wife writing

About the author (1989)

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.

Bibliographic information

TitleRetired Dreams: Dom Casmurro, Myth and Modernity
AuthorPaul B. Dixon
PublisherPurdue University Press, 1989
Original fromthe University of California
DigitizedAug 30, 2011
ISBN0911198989, 9780911198980
Length150 pages
Subjects ›  › 

Literary Criticism / Caribbean & Latin American
Literary Criticism / European / Spanish & Portuguese
Literary Criticism / General
  
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