The woman and the city: pictures of brazilian modernity in the four writers of São Paulo city

Author(s)

Bianca Ribeiro Manfrini

• Document type: Master's Dissertation
• Press: São Paulo.
• Institution: Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH/SBD)
• Defense date: 2008-06-10

Examining board members

Marcos Antonio de Moraes; Joaquim Alves de Aguiar; Marisa Philbert Lajolo

• Advisor: Marcos Antonio de Moraes

Abstract

Our work is based on the analysis of four writers whose work has been composed in the city of São Paulos 20th century: Patrícia Galvão (1930s), Maria José Dupré (1940s), Carolina Maria de Jesus (1950s and 60s) and Zulmira Ribeiro Tavares (1980s and 90s). The aim of our essay is to show how the historic content of Brazilian modernity appears in the aesthetic form of the novels, poems and journals of each writer, composing a fragmentary panel of the city and discussing their works in relation to the canonic production of their time, questioning the position of the so called secondary writer and his critical importance not only for literary historiography but as to a more deep comprehension of the historical process of modernization, still in course. Through different writers and genres, whose more down-toearth themes show a raw image of the city, we try to emphasize the necessity of a critical method aware of the variety of the literary system and the importance of comparing great and minor literary works, in the power that both have of throwing light to each other and consequently to the society that surrounds them, in opposition to the usual studies of great figures of our modernism, approached generally in their more metaphysical aspects, distanced from the historical and social ground from where grows the literary phenomenon. (AU)