José de Alencar: the people, the language and literature

• Autor(a) principal: Fonseca de Alencar, Manoel Carlos
• Data de Publicação: 2021
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Anos 90 (Online)
• Texto Completo: https://seer.ufrgs.br/index.php/anos90/article/view/90928
• topic: História; Literatura; Língua Brasileira; José de Alencar; Historia do Brasil; Literatura; History. Literature. Brazilian language. José de Alencar.

This article analyzes the thought of the writer José de Alencar regarding the originality of Brazilian literature, using the essay O nosso cancioneiro and the set of textual elements that accompany the novels Iracema and Sonhos d’ouro. In the sense of thinking this originality the author made observations related to both aspects: linguistic and focusing the formation of the Brazilian people. From the linguistic point of view, at first, Alencar took into account the indigenous language, considering the use of his words in the literary narrative. AfterIracema, however, his attention was drawn to what he called “the language spoken by the people”, present in two popular poems from O nosso cancioneiro which were analysed. Regarding the formation of the Brazilian people,a process that in the preface to Sonhos d’ouro the author correlates with the phases of literature, the emphasis is on the adaptation of the Portuguese to the tropics, much more than considerations about miscegenation. It aims to demonstrate that although José de Alencar considered the importance of the native language and the speech people to the singularity of the Brazilian Literature, the author had them like inferiors, made elitist and excluding its project of homogenization of the language and the literature.