Retired Dreams: Dom Casmurro, Myth and Modernity

By Paul B. Dixon

Retired Dreams discusses Machado de Assis's Dom Casmurro, Brazil's greatest novel and one of the little-recognized masterpieces of all the America's. Published precisely at the turn of the century, Dom Casmurro can be considered a literary milestone, giving the last word on the tradition of the realistic bourgeois novel and opening the door to the preoccupations of contemporary writers. The book is pervaded by a sense of change; its narrator/protagonist seems caught between a primitive mentality of archetype and a consciousness of the transitory modern world.

Retired Dreams explores this tension. Dixon identifies the quest myth, highly displaced, as the underlying narrative model and the shaper of the narrator's thinking. He devotes separate chapters to the function of time, to the rebirth motif, the role of matriarchy and patriarchy, the voyage motif and woman as anima, and symbols and primitivism. Particular attention is given to the role of the major tropes (metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony) as devices permitting both the connection and the distancing between the tradition of heroic discourse and the domesticated, unheroic reality of the novel's characters. Through this rhetorical-mythic lens, the book examines many of the factors that have continued to fascinate both general readers and critics - the work's ambiguous plot and characterization its problematic ideology its self-conscious artistry and its cosmic vision.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0911198989
• ISBN13: 9780911198980
• Release Date: September 1989
• Publisher: Purdue University Press
• Length: 150 Pages
• Weight: 0.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.5" x 8.3"