INEQUALITY, EXCLUSION AND URBAN VIOLENCE IN HYPERCONTEMPORARY NARRATIVES

Abstract

The city and the urban, thought of, lived and experienced as expanded and unstable space-times, show themselves as a fragmentary physical, social, economic, political, and cultural texture, but they also fl aunt an unarguable density and live in a turbulent and steadfast (Crang e Thrift, 2000). This article aims to analyse the interactions with the urban space and its expansion processes in the brazilian big cities. It aims to discuss the representations of the urban culture, gazing upon the relations with the streets located in the downtown area of the brazilian modernized cities in the 40’s, 50’s, 60’s and 70’s. The article also thinks over the contacts with the (hyper)contemporary city – multifaceted, dispersed, unequal, contradictory. The readings of the nowadays Porto Alegre are explained through and above all, the reconfi gurations of the urban spaces, thinking over the presence of the slums, another symbol of the brazilian inequality. The representations of violence, anonymity and social stratification are observed in the narratives “Verão” and “A aventura prático-intelectual do Sr. Alexandre Costa”, texts in Os lados do círculo (2005), by Amílcar Bettega Barbosa. Both the short stories have as their theme the contemporary urban violence: the murder of homeless people by a serial killer in the short “A aventura prático-intelectual do Sr. Alexandre Costa”, and the murder of the businessman Wagner Henrique, a result of arguments between Wagner and the residents of the slum Vila Cruzeiro, in the narrative “Verão”.