The architects of the future. The United States

• Autor(a) principal: Felgueiras, Carmen Lucia Tavares
• Data de Publicação: 2001
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Estudos Históricos (Rio de Janeiro)
• Texto Completo: https://periodicos.fgv.br/reh/article/view/2134
• topic: Narrativa

This work introduces an interpretation of the social thought of Monteiro Lobato and of Eduardo Prado, examining the way each author produced, through their literary works, a peculiar vision of the American society. The central elements of the argument are the notions of force and of spirit of the Americans and their meanings for both authors. In the case of Monteiro Lobato, the utilization of american society as a model takes as its basic pressuposition the absence of contradiction between Lobato's determinist vision and voluntarism, which can be deduced from his understanding of progress as an inexorable process as much as a result of a decision. On the other hand, the presence of a second look over North America, no more marked by the idea of force but by that of spirit, is the other face of the first one, and it will be through it that Lobato, soothing his voluntarism, will approach the idea of the american society as a product of a collective construction. Also founded in the notion of force, the conception of America of Eduardo Prado has a historicist perspective of interpretation that prints ambivalence in the evaluation of this force, positive in its origins, negative at the moment when he refers to the contemporary American republic, which makes it incompatible, as a model, with an aspired nationalistic politics.