Da negação do nacional ao nacional negativo : a crítica sobre Machado de Assis (do oitocentos ao contemporâneo)

• Autor(a) principal: Alcantara Filho, Wolmyr Aimberê
• Data de Publicação: 2017
• Tipo de documento: Tese
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Repositório Institucional da Universidade Federal do Espírito Santo (riUfes)
• Texto Completo: http://repositorio.ufes.br/handle/10/9180
• topic: Literature critics; National; History of Brazil; Machado de Assis; Crítica literária; Nacionalismo; História do Brasil; Letras; Assis, Machado de, 1839-1908 - Crítica e interpretação; Literatura brasileira - História e crítica; Nacionalismo e literatura; 82

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.