Brazilian Modernism

In February 1922, in São Paulo, a Week of Modern Art brought together poets, painters and musicians to the whistles of the audience. The generation that came out of it wanted a Brazilian language rid of courtly Portuguese: writing as one speaks, swallowing foreign influences instead of imitating them, what Oswald de Andrade called anthropophagy. Macunaíma is its hero, without character, made of every region of the country. The following decade brought the novel back to the drought of the Nordeste and the poverty of peasants, in Graciliano Ramos.

works 6

• NovelMacunaímaMário de Andrade · 1928A novel in which an Indian hero without character, changeable and lazy, crosses Brazil to recover a stolen amulet.LiteraturePublic domain
• PoetryLibertinagemManuel Bandeira · 1930not translated into EnglishA collection of free-verse poems in which the memory of a childhood in Recife stands alongside irony and illness.Literature
• NovelSerafim Ponte GrandeOswald de Andrade · 1933not translated into EnglishA novel in fragments in which a São Paulo civil servant drops everything to roam the world, parodying every genre.Literature
• NovelBarren LivesVidas secasGraciliano Ramos · 1938A novel about a family of Nordeste peasants driven out by drought, told in thirteen almost self-contained chapters.Literature
• PoetryInvenção de OrfeuJorge de Lima · 1952not translated into EnglishAn epic poem in ten cantos in which a Christian Orpheus seeks his island, between the Bible, Camões and the memory of childhood.Literature
• CinemaMacunaímaJoaquim Pedro de Andrade · 1969A film that has the characterless hero of the 1928 novel live through the time of the dictatorship and urban guerrilla warfare.Cinema