Arte ou produto: a divisão entre “alta literatura” e “literatura comercial” no Brasil contemporâneo

Abstract

There is a certain discomfort in the literary milieu regarding the division of narrative works into two supposed groups, commercial literature and high literature. The opposition suggests more than a difference in the number of sales or the aesthetic value of the works. Scholars such as Leyla Perrone-Moisés and Muniz Sodré present these two poles as having different textual and narrative characteristics. Thus, internal aspects of these types of literature would make one more deserving of prestige and the other more capable of achieving popular fame. However, considering the characteristics of contemporary Brazilian literature and reviewing the theories that are favorable to the classification in question, it is conceivable to assert, in fact, the existence of these groups as essentially distinct? Through an analytical bibliographic research, we investigated the origin of the concepts of “high” and “comercial” literature from the ideas of autonomous art and mass culture, we examined how this division manifested in the history of Brazilian literature, and we tried to understand its functionality for the analysis and valuation of national production today, having as a sample a selection of novels published in the period that extends from 2011 to 2015. We conclude that this classification says more about the type of social consecration of the authors and the works than about the internal characteristics and the literary value of these works, and that some criteria used to divide contemporary Brazilian literature into high and commercial are too antiquated and reductionist to hold up such a production.