Internacionalização da Literatura Brasileira Research Papers (original) (raw)

***** Lohanna Machado IS NOT a co-author of this book. I'm just helping to spread it by making it available on this platform ***** Where was Brazil in the so-called "Latin American" literary Boom? Third World Literary Fortunes posits a response contrasting the figures of Jorge Amado, "vulgar" but uniquely successful in turning Brazilian popular energies into literature, and Joo Guimares Rosa, "Brazil's Joyce." The Brazilian establishment expected Rosa would win the Nobel Prize. Abroad Rosa remains utterly obscure. Piers Armstrong probes the gulf between the Brazilian intelligentsia's perception of the world and the world's perceptions of Brazil - in which the Brazilian elite is essentially invisible. The result is a cultural mapping of the relative power of four great rhetorical currents: literary Brazil; popular artistic expressions of identity dominated by Rio and Bahia; the representation by white social anthropologists of Brazilian popular culture as being unique by virtue of its (their) blackness; finally, the dissonance between Brazilian literature and the supposedly continental dimensions of the Spanish American writers apotheosized in the Boom as the poetic priests of Latin American alterity. Third World Literary Fortunes introduces the reader to the life and work of five of Brazil's greatest writers, including (apart from Rosa and Amado): the country's other "greatest" writer, the extraordinarily subtle and psychologically acute Machado de Assis, a mulatto who, though a witness to slavery completely effaced his own racial identity from his work; its best poet, Carlos Drummond de Andrade, one of the great twentieth century portraitists of urban bourgeois mediocrity; and the seminal Renaissance man of Brazilian modernism, Mrio de Andrade. The book examines their respective domestic and international receptions, discerning a clear pattern of international irrelevance with the exception of the black sheep, Jorge Amado - the only major Brazilian writer who celebrated negritude. The enormous differences between the other writers lead Armstrong to the conclusion that the common point determining international failure is the absence of the one marketologically apt rhetoric of identity, the "Carmen Miranda syndrome" - the cultural aura of coastal and urban Afro-Brazilian and the sexual mystique of the mulatta, present in Amado's work but also in the brilliant speculative socioanthropology of Gilberto Freyre, Rio's carnaval and in the current explosion of cultural tourism to Bahia.

Piers Armstrong é brasilianista e professor de línguas modernas na California State University (LA). É autor de Third world literary fortunes: Brazilian Culture and its International Reception (1999) que versa sobre a assimetria entre a... more