Unfähigkeit: Die Figur des Angestellten als schwacher Held im Roman der Moderne (Italo Svevo und Cyro dos Anjos)

The employee as a typical figure of modernity has been represented as a specific type of literary anti-hero since the nineteenth century. Italo Svevo's early novel, Una vita (1982, A Life), is an example that is strongly related to the theme of the anti-hero in the French novel of disillusion, as well as to the fin-desiécle concern with an incapacitated, dilettante protagonist, unable to act and live. In light of Svevo's own misgivings about the profession of writing fiction, the novel reflects on the relation between literature and life, by way of an uprooted individual who finds himself ill at ease in the anonymous, competitive world of modernity. The subject of Svevo's novel, the arrival of a provincial, petit-bourgeois intellectual to a semi-provincial city, may also be found in a somewhat later Brazilian novel, O amanuense Belmiro (The amanuensis Belmiro, 1937) by Cyro dos Anjos. Aside from parallels of plot, social, and geographical setting, which are grounded in the experience of modernity in different contexts, the two novels may be said to model a new land of author-function, as well as a specific form of a non-linear, self-reflexive novel. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]