O quebra-nozes de Machado de Assis: crítica e nacionalismo

Abstract

The aim of this thesis is to examine three nationalist perspectives offered by the critical work of Machado de Assis. We seek, initially, the intellectual feature of the young Machado inside the romantic-nationalist project, with which he was aligned and of which he would stand back gradually. Therefore, he was collated, initially, with two militants of that defensive nationalism: Santiago Nunes Ribeiro and Joaquim Norberto de Sousa Silva. This place from where Machado spoke wins, in definition, in a second moment, when we undertake the comparative analysis of his texts with those of Macedo Soares and José de Alencar. Mainly between 1859 and 1872, Machado de Assis would build his theater critics, becoming a paladin of the realistic French comedy. The first nationalistic side of Machado's critique is asseverated in this deep involvement with the project of a Brazilian theater guided in the pedagogical potential of the high comedy. The second nationalist perspective is defined insofar as Machado s modern classicism, a very personal articulation of his Universalist vision with the already established literary modernity. For the analysis of this bias, we use the corpus of his literary criticism built as an autonomous genre, conventionally offered to the public, through which writers and readers were enabled to interfere in society, fulfilling, patriotically, the mission for which the literature prepared them. From 1883 on, Machado recovers the chronic after being almost five years away from it. He recovers and uses it to exercise more frankly and assiduously, a particular theory of the Brazilian culture and, simultaneously, a kind of search of our national character. Thus, his nationalism, in a third angulation, is oriented towards the human experience, which between incorporating external foundation and resisting to it turns out by forming something irremediably Brazilian; this chronicle, therefore, carries a critique of cultural feature, in the sense that Machado was committed with meanings and values of our social life. Upon examining him as a writer who originally places himself against cultural colonialism; who soon engaged in a civilizatory project led by the theater and literature and that, at last, investigated the collective Brazilian sensitiveness departing from their cultural representations, this thesis grants a more thorough understanding of the intersections between the themes "nationalism" and "Machado de Assis