Utopia and dystopia in postmodern letters: An analysis of "They were many horses", by Luiz Ruffato

Abstract

The rupture with traditions and the disappearance of the feeling of history meant that the new social fabric began to gradually lose the need to keep the past and began to live in a continuous present. These signs can be easily observed in art, literature, and social dynamics as a whole, as well as revealing the moment of exhaustion of the modern project of society and the advance of a new social order arising from postmodern conditions. In this sense, this article proposes to analyze utopia and dystopia in the novel They Were Many Horses, by Luiz Ruffato as a legitimizing aspect of postmodernity, as well as the purposeful pastiche used by the author as a way to reveal contemporary social reality. To this end, it verifies the characteristics of modernity in the work of Oswald de Andrade, Memórias Sentimentmentales de João Miramar, and the trajectory to reach postmodernity revealed in the narrative of Luiz Ruffato, in addition to presenting consumption as a triumph of of postmodernity and an important cause of utopia and dystopia in the work.