Body in ruins: writing among archives and the testimony of literature. The thesis investigates the unstable place of twentieth-century literature through reflections on literature archives or through writings that explore archives, as well as documents, testimonies and other vestiges of time taken as devices for textual compositions, with the purpose of outlining and discussing the presence and the rise of the archive in the literature of the last century, proposing, finally, that such presence will be constituted precisely through a literary environment established in the mid-nineteenth century and deepened in the course of the twentieth century, toward ours, such an environment in which one may point out, before the failure of stationary models of modern literature, the intrinsic necessity of searching, through literary writing, a other place for literature, through the gesture and the effort of writing, following, for such purpose, three concepts, myth, melancholy and impropriety, and a fourth one, utopia, seen from the perspective of non-place. For these objectives, the research goes through, by different approaches, the archive collections and literary works of Fernando Pessoa, W.G. Sebald and Pedro Nava, and works of Valêncio Xavier, among other writers. As complementary topics, the thesis finds philology and textual criticism, memory and memorialism, testimony writing and the literature of trauma, the crisis of representation and a deviation of realism towards an affective index.