Cover -- EVERYDAY CONSUMPTION -- Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- Theories of Consumption -- Historicizing Consumption in Latin America -- Consumption and Everyday Life -- Chapter One A Consumer's Dystopia -- Bonassi's Luxúria: Brazil, Country of the Future! Are We There Yet? -- Everyday Violence -- Everyday Numbness -- The Factory and the Country: The Right Turn? -- Sant' Anna's O Brasil e bom: Federal Republic of Consumption -- The Growth of Neoconservatism -- Brazil, a Country of "Nice" People -- Brazil Isn't Too Bad. Or Is It? -- Policing Consumption

Chapter Two The Consuming Self -- Lísias's O livro dos mandarins: What Is in a Name? -- Of Great Leaders and Neoliberal Thought -- Failure: The Narrative Behind the Narrative -- Bernardo Carvalho's Reprodução: Information in the Era of Reproduction -- Talking to Oneself -- The (Dis)Information Era -- A Time of Crisis -- Language and Power -- Of Utopic Futures -- Chapter Three Consumer Culture's "Collateral Damage" -- Invisible Lives -- Everyday Death -- Of Meat Consumption -- Conclusion -- Chapter Four A Consumer's Dreams and Nightmares -- Galera's Mãos de cavalo: A Mass-Mediated Sensibility

Laub's A maçã envenenada: Between Kurt Cobain and Imaculee Ilibagiza -- Conclusion -- Chapter Five Working-Class Consumption -- Consuming Together -- Aesthetic Interruptions of the Mundane -- Low and High -- Tactical Consumption -- Conclusion -- Conclusion -- Notes -- Works Cited -- Index -- About the Book -- About the Author

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Everyday Consumption in Twenty-First-Century Brazilian Fiction is the first in-depth study to map out the representation of consumption in contemporary Brazilian prose, highlighting how our interactions with commodities connect seemingly disconnected areas of everyday life, such as eating habits, the growth of prosperity theology, and ideas of success and failure. It is also the first text to provide a pluralistic perspective on the representation of consumption in this fiction that moves beyond the concern with aesthetic judgment of culture based on binaries such as good/bad or elevated/degraded that have largely informed criticism on this body of literary work. Current Brazilian fiction provides a variety of perspectives from which to think about our daily interactions with commodities and about how consumption affects us all in subtle ways. Collectively, the narratives analyzed in the book present a wide spectrum of more or less hopeful portrayals of existence in consumer culture, from totalizing dystopia to transformative hope.-- Provided by publisher.

Description based on print version record.