The book is a result of my continuous research performed over the past few years, always discussing a fiction concerned with the possibilities of literary intervention in the reality of the historical moment. Thus, an understanding of the actual role of literature is strategic in the definition of the contemporary, and the book starts with a hypothesis of a certain optimism among current writers and artists with respect to the aesthetic, ethical, and political role of literature and art in the twentieth century. This book pursues a discussion of contemporary Brazilian fiction, mainly the production that has guided the past two decades. It is recognizably difficult, if not impossible, to take account of the full diversity of the prose during this period in Brazil, and the thematic topics raised by each chapter aim to organize our understanding of what characterizes contemporary fiction.

For this reason, as indicated in the title, two axes of reading stand out around a overhauled understanding of realism, on the one hand, and, on the other, of the relevance of affect in the assessment of the role of literary production in current Brazilian literature. With an emphasis on the relation between realism and affect, representation and interpretation are abandoned as a primordial axis of reading and instead an explanation of historical experience in the materiality of aesthetic experience itself is sought. From this perspective, the goal is to show how this reality is manifested on the body of the reader, in the way, for example, the work “touches” its reader like an atmosphere, a sensible climate or attunement or disharmony, leaving the mark of the physical and material encounter that is performed objectively and immediately in reading, and that promotes a concrete historical mediation with its specific context and environment.

Recent literary studies of Brazil generally accept that there was a transformation in the 1960s and 1970s, from a narrative mainly situated in regional areas of the backlands, to the appearance of the big city as a contradictory scenario for national literature. Novelists and short story writers who are consolidated at that time encounter in the big cities of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro a reality that not only brought a promise of modernity but also produced a civic marginality that came with extreme poverty, violence, and organized crime.