A recepção da obra de Graciliano Ramos no Brasil e nos EUA: da crítica inaugural nos jornais aos estudos acadêmicos

Abstract

Brazilian literature, regarding the dissemination of works and the criticism about them, had a great deal of development in the newspapers. In the first half of the twentieth century, the languages and literature colleges were still in formation, therefore, the circulation of literary criticism in the periodicals was extreme important to the discussion and appropriation of literary texts. Because of that, one of the objectives of this research is to analyze the critical reception of Graciliano Ramos work at the time of its publication, between 1930 and 1950, in newspapers of great circulation in Rio de Janeiro, verifying how this inaugural reception reverberated in the later academic writings. Another purpose of this thesis is to investigate the reception of the work of the writer from Alagoas in the United States of America, by analyzing the main critical works published in North American land, also in the 1930s and 1950s, as well as in the current studies of the researcher Darlene Sadlier, professor and director of the Portuguese Program at Indiana University, who identifies the years of good neighbor policy (1933-1945) as a fundamental moment for the cultural approximation between Brazil and the United States. For our examination, we shall consider the studies of Samuel Putnam (1892-1950), one of the first American essayists and translators dedicated to Brazilian literature, Ralph Dimmick s (1916-2015) article, The Brazilian literary generation of 1930 (1951), Fred P. Ellison s book (1922-2014), Brazil's new novel: four northeastern masters (1954), which dedicates a chapter to Graciliano, and Érico Veríssimo s book, Brazilian Literature: an outline, published in the USA, in 1945. Through this research it will be possible to broaden the horizons of investigation in the aesthetic and historical dimensions, observing the relevance of the critical discourse to the repercussion of the reception of Graciliano Ramos work inside and outside the Brazilian context