Name: WOLMYR AIMBERÊ ALCANTARA FILHO
Publication date: 26/09/2017
Advisor:
Name |
Role |
|---|---|
| WILBERTH CLAYTHON FERREIRA SALGUEIRO | Advisor * |
Examining board:
| Name |
Role |
|---|---|
| FABÍOLA SIMÃO PADILHA TREFZGER | Internal Examiner * |
| MARIA AMÉLIA DALVI SALGUEIRO | Internal Examiner * |
| PAULO ROBERTO DE SOUZA DUTRA | Internal Alternate * |
| WILBERTH CLAYTHON FERREIRA SALGUEIRO | Advisor * |
Summary: ABSTRACT
The national was always relevant to the Machadian critique of various times. Silvio
Romero, José Veríssimo and Araripe Júnior were the first to address the problem.
Machado, who did not use to write according to a romantic and nationalist tradition,
had his Brazilianness studied, scanned and even questioned by these researchers.
However, there was also a feeling that the representations of the country in his work
followed a more "inner and intimate" movement, and therefore were more difficult to
observe. A second generation of scholars, under the historical and cultural context of
the Estado Novo, brought up the national aspect again. The writer's negritude, a
previously off-limits subject, was now a demonstration of his value. Machado would
have won despite being black, said Lúcia Miguel-Pereira, who sees in the novels of
the first phase an attempt by the author to represent, in an encrypted way, his
experience. More recently, new literary critics have reflected on the national problem
in Machado. No longer understood as non-existent, the national gains now the
adjective of negative, in the reading of Roberto Schwarz. For the critic, the writer,
with no need to participate in the formation of Brazilian literature, can devote himself
to the work of problematizing, in novels and short stories, our peripheral condition. A
"turnaround" in the Machadian readings can thus be observed, being more important
than the so-called "universalist" readings. John Gledson, Sidney Chalhoub, and
Eduardo de Assis Duarte would be examples of scholars who, like Schwarz, have
given consistency to this new view of the writer, which brings to the stage of debates
such terms as blackness, slavery, and social class. As a crowning of this way of
reading Machado, there is the problematization of the first-person narrators of the
novels. The interpretations that Memórias póstumas de Brás Cubas, Dom Casmurro
and Memorial de Aires received from these scholars have subverted the way of
reading the novels and brought discussions that we consider to be relevant today.
Keywords: Machado de Assis; Literature critics; National; History of Brazil.
