Brazilian Literature - Post-Modernism

Post-Modernism

What defined Brazilian modernism were two main traits: experimentalism in language and an enhanced social consciousness, or a mix between the two - as was the case with Osvald de Andrade, who was briefly attracted towards the communist movement. The reaction to modernism, then, assumed the form of a mix between its most salient trait, the use of more formal literary language (as was the case of the so-called "generation of 1945", whose twin hallmarks were, firstly, the highly physical poetry of João Cabral de Melo Neto, who opposed Carlos Drummond de Andrade's poetic modernism, and secondly the sonnets - on both the Italian and English model - of the early Vinicius de Moraes), followed by varying doses, according to the author considered, of subjectivism, political conservatism and militant Catholicism.

Two writers from that "school" that have published after the 1950s are without a doubt already inside the canon of Brazilian literature: Clarice Lispector, whose existentialist novels and short stories are filled with stream-of-consciousness and epiphanies, and João Guimarães Rosa, whose experimental language has changed the face of Brazilian literature forever. His novel Grande Sertão: Veredas has been compared to James Joyce's Ulysses or Alfred Döblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz.

Following in the wake of conservative subjectivism inaugurated by the militantly Catholic novelists-cum-polemicists Octavio de Faria, Lúcio Cardoso, Cornélio Penna and Gustavo Corção, Nelson Rodrigues made his career as playwright and sports journalist. His plays and short stories - the latter mostly originally published as newspaper feulletons - chronicled the social mores of the 1950s and 1960s; adultery and sexual pathologies in general being a major fixation of his. His sports writing describes the evolution of football into the national passion of Brazil. He was heavily critical of the young leftists who opposed the military dictatorship after the 1964 coup; for that he was penned as right-wing and conservative. For a time heavily pro-dictatorship, he had to suffer the tragic fate of having one his sons being tortured and incarcerated for belonging to an underground guerrilla organization.