Synopsis
This compelling, many-faceted work argues that Western culture has always found something profoundly unsettling about imaginative writing and that it has devised various ways of 'containing' such writing or at least making it less dangerous. The historical record of censorship and other forms of the containment of literature is relatively well known, though it has been analyzed more often in terms of its effects on literature than its causes. Costa Lima demonstrates that theories of society and of human nature are at stake in these acts of rejection and condemnation. A new historical consciousness has recently swept across the entire breadth of literary studies. However, Costa Lima shows that this return to history is frequently nothing more than the return of an unexamined old history of literature, merely updated in its vocabulary and reflecting current concerns with such issues as gender or cultural difference. By contrast, he challenges the assumptions of the old history (and therefore of the new, insofar as the latter reinstates the old) and calls for the elaboration of an entirely different perspective on the historical course of literature. Costa Lima asserts that since the beginning of modernity, Western reason has been shaped in opposition to - and through the repression of - the imaginative faculty, typified by fictionality. He focuses on the history of such concepts as mimesis, individuality, and verisimilitude, and in the process covers a wide range of authors and topics - Cervantes, Diderot, Borges, autobiographical writing, and Latin American literature, among others. The Dark Side of Reason consists of essays drawn from two books, Sociedade e discurso ficcional (1986) and O Fingidor e o censor (1988). It also includes a chapter, written especially for this volume, that discusses Shakespeare's Tempest in the light of Costa Lima's argument about control of the imaginary.<
Review
'Costa Lima's argument, highly original and likely to prove controversial, invites us to reread the course of literature from a new perspective. Such an invitation requires solid historical documentation and a persuasive reinterpretation of major texts; both are to be found here in abundance. Costa Lima enriches our understanding of the intellectual ground upon which literature has a place assigned in history to various writers and critics and forces us to read many works anew. His perspective is not only transnational, but it integrates the literature of the Americas, and specifically of South America, into the broader course of literary history as a full-fledged participant in the struggles of legitimation waged by imaginative writing.'Wlad Godzich, University of Geneva
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