Indignation and resentment: the authoritarian personality in Brazil, observed through the work of Graciliano Ramos

• Grant number: 17/09933-0
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: September 01, 2017
• End date: August 31, 2018
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Sociology - Other specific Sociologies
• Principal Investigator: Ana Lucia de Freitas Teixeira
• Grantee: Felipe Palmer Lima Costa
• Host Institution: Escola de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (EFLCH). Universidade Federal de São Paulo (UNIFESP). Campus Guarulhos. Guarulhos , SP, Brazil

Abstract

The project intends to carry out a sociological analysis through literary materials, with the goal of investigating through them relevant aspects of a certain ideological structure present in Brazilian society. It is a question of investigating the conservative thinking of an authoritarian tendency present in the middle strata of the urban petty bourgeoisie of the 1930s. Aiming to capture substantive elements of this ideological / social structure, we take as main object of study the literary work by Graciliano Ramos titled "Angústia", which will be compared with two theoretical perspectives of social analysis ("Raízes do Brasil", by Sergio Buarque de Holanda, and Theodor Adorno's studies on anti-Semitism). Based on the analysis of Antonio Candido and Roberto Schwarz, the project aims to find a "structural correspondences between literature and social life" and takes as central perspective the parallel between literary text and social matter. The proposal presented by Antônio Candido in the text "Criticism and Sociology", is a mode of analysis of the literary work in which sociological matter becomes the constructive device of the formal structure that governs the text. So the social elements would cease to be just external influences to the aesthetic analysis to become part of the aesthetic matter itself that forms the work. It is, therefore, to understand through the narrative form of the novel some ideological aspects of the web of forces present in the social structure of Brazil in the 1930s. In particular, the contradictions of the modernizing project that cohabited with the authoritarian ideas present at that moment, therefore seeking to capture through literature non-obvious aspects of social reality that allow us to draw bridges with the contradictions of the present. (AU)