Call for Submission - SPECIAL ISSUE: How to narrate the real in post-real times

2023-01-02

SPECIAL ISSUE: How to narrate the real in post-real times

Period: 20/12/2022 a 05/03/2023

Based on the definition of spectacle as the combination of the social relations mediated by images, Guy Debord defines The Society of the Spectacle (1967) as a particular stage of capitalism, when capital and image accumulation processes are intrinsically connected and are part of daily life. This position means that everything, interpersonal and political relationships, religious and environmental manifestations, all of that would be commodified and surrounded by images. As a consequence, by perceiving that appearance monopolizes social relations, we can state that Debord, avant la lettre, was one of the first theoreticians of post-reality. This fact happens because, in the 21^st century, it is impossible to distinguish the real from the image. To better understand this phenomenon, we can take professional North American wrestling as an example. The attraction of wrestling is the drama, explicit in each actor, between good and evil. But, more than that, during the combat, the audience cheers for the wrestlers and feels the clash in the ring as if the choreography trained is in fact a fight. This phenomenon occurs because, for those who are watching, as it is impossible to prove anything, only the spectacle exists. Not by chance Roland Barthes uses wrestling as an example (perhaps the main example) in his Mythologies (1957). According to Barthes, the myth distorts the facts, making people set aside their critical sense when dealing with it. Therefore, the author suggests that the myth would be a constitutive part of human communication, since it is capable of expressing phantasies and feelings of the society. However, the 21^stcentury seems to live immersed in this universe of post-reality, generating a crisis that goes much beyond the hyperreality of Jean Baudrillard (1981). In this context, the possibilities of narration, representation, and identity are completely destabilized. In other words, the crisis is the omnipresence of more concrete simulacra, more palpable, more credible than reality itself, because they are progressively incorporated narratives, as defined by Rebeka Guarda, Marcia Ohlson and Anderson Romanini in “Disinformation, dystopia and post-reality in social media: a semiotic-cognitive perspective” (2018). Therefore, how can one narrate the real when reality becomes the stage of a nonsensical sequence of dystopic and surreal events? How to textually fictionalize when daily life becomes a plot of fantastic fabulations? How to win the imaginative power of an actuality filled with implausible and absurd happenings? How to replace the capacity of deforming language when facing a succession of unusual facts? Life has become implausible and has little credibility. Dealing with all that, could contemporary Brazilian literature still be able to include the traumas and webs of a fake and apocalyptical world? This edition of the Letras de Hoje journal aims to receive productions dealing with the theme of narrative and poetic solutions and disillusions in a post-real world.