LITERARY CRITICISM IN BRAZIL: FROM THE FIRST MOVEMENTS TO MODERNIST INFLECTIONS

Abstract

Literary criticism in Brazil is a unique area in the intellectual life of researchers and scholars who, focusing on the production of novelists, poets, short story writers, playwrights, etc., seek, based on judgments, almost always with reservations, to situate the point from a historical, cultural, stylistic point of view, etc., the work analyzed, in order to provide information for the reading public. In this detail, based on a diachronic movement, this study seeks to discuss how literary criticism was established in the Brazilian cultural scene, as well as its contributions to the strengthening and reception of works of the most varied genres. To do so, we start by presenting the first “critical” movements in the horizon of the historiography of Brazilian literature, an aspect that dates back to the 18th century, in the context of Arcadianism, also known as Neoclassicism; to the critical movements in the first three decades of the 20th century, taking into account the conceptual reflections of the modernist movement and neoregionalism in the novels of the 1930s generation. In general terms, we can indicate that criticism is a complicit practice, it is the unfolding of a shared relationship, in a way that lives and feeds on the creative dialogue between the observer, who seeks to understand, and the observed, who expects to be understood. Thus, Criticism is also the reciprocally respectful pact between the avid gaze and the illumination arising from the polysemic and, often, challenging text.