The resignification of futurism in Luiz Ruffato's literature

Abstract

This work proposes a study of the way in which the writer Luiz Ruffato – in They were many horses – challenges and reinvents various poetics of the western literary tradition. It analyzes, in particular, the aesthetic affinities of this book with the proposals of the Italian futurist vanguard. For that, we used the theoretical support of authors such as Gilberto Mendonça Teles, Maria Adélia Menegazzo, José Mendes Ferreira and Augusto de Campos. Presenting itself as a literature constructed under a fragmented, rapid, imagistic and multifaceted poetics, They were many horses proposes many reflections on the urban and contemporary Brazilian society. Through collages and short narratives that represent several stories of a chaotic metropolis, Ruffato configures an unbalanced and dirty mosaic, composed of crimes, family breakdown, disease, consumerism, underemployment, addictions and other ills that permeate this modern society. Making use of a language close to futuristic poetics, composed of words in freedom in relation to the syntactic order and the formal use of punctuation; as well as the use of typographic and onomatopoeic resources; Ruffato proposes a spatiotemporal relationship that seeks to provoke in the reader a feeling of dynamism typical of the modern city. Given this complex literary materiality, this work proposes an analysis of the social reflections and aesthetic innovations proposed in They were many horses