The peripheral marginal literature and the literary canon

Abstract

Literature is largely dependent on a view of culture identified with scholarly artistic and intellectual manifestations, preserving the prerogatives of the tastes, aesthetic and moral standards of the groups that have the power to legitimize it. Despite the prevalence of privileged positions in the modes of representation and institutionalization of literature, the forms of literature intervention in the social space have undergone a considerable expansion in contemporary culture, a phenomenon observable in manifestations such as the entry of marginal voices, which confer singular uses and purposes to literary expressions, problematizing canonical conceptions that reduce the aesthetic to the normative, to the primacy of the individual and the private. Given this scenario, the present article confronts canonical conceptions of literature prevailing in contemporary criticism with questions derived from peripheral literary production. To this end, we analyze, on the one hand, Leyla Perrone-Moses’s view of literature in the book Mutations of Literature in the 21st Century; on the other, the formulations of two of the most prominent authors of peripheral marginal literature, Ferréz and Sérgio Vaz, based on the texts Literary Terrorism and Street Literature, respectively. At the end, the article reflects on the place of literature in contemporary culture.