Resumen de Entering History through Literature: Personalism and Personification in Fonseca’s Agosto
A new close reading of Rubem Fonseca's Agosto (1990), three decades after its publication and the first years of transition from Brazil's longest dictatorial regime to its current democratic experience, could not be more timely. The following article aims to provide this new reading, engaging with the intersections of literature and history in Fonseca's novel, a re-elaboration of Getúlio Vargas's last days before his suicide in August 1954. Building on literary and political theory (Barthes, Foucault, Virno, Esposito, Spivak, and others), I discuss personalism and personification in this text, that can be read both as detective fiction and as a historical novel. Finally, I offer a reading of a set of metonymies that Fonseca uses to portray unsolved political tensions between individualism and the state, mythology and historiography, the people, the subaltern and the multitude.
