THE CLOUDED HINTERLAND: ARARIPE JÚNIOR AND THE PRODUCTION OF THE NORTHERN
HINTERLAND IN BRAZILIAN LITERATURE (XIX-XX)
Sertão; Literature; Araripe Júnior; Brasilian Obnubilation.
This dissertation has as its object the sertão in Brazilian literature of the 19th century, in the work of the writer and literary critic Tristão de Alencar Araripe Júnior, an author who belonged to the generation of intellectuals of the 1870s, having active participation in the Brazilian intellectual debate. Alongside Capistrano de Abreu and Raimundo Antônio da Rocha Lima, he participated in the French Academy and later in the Escola Popular. Besides these two institutions, Araripe Júnior also participated in the Recife School, which existed parallel to the French Academy of Fortaleza, without one necessarily influencing the other. The Recife School had predominantly Germanic intellectual tendencies resulting from the choice of its mentors, such as Tobias Barreto and Sílvio Romero, based mainly on Ernst Heinrich Philipp August Haeckel's Monism and Herbert Spencer's Evolutionism, besides the orthodox and heterodox Positivism, giving a scientific orientation to his studies. Despite this, his work received limited attention in academic works outside the literary field, especially regarding the theme of the sertão. In this sense, we seek, based on the work O Reino Encantado: crônica sebastianista (1878), to understand how the author constructs in his writing an idea of the sertão. In his vast critical production, Araripe Jr. created the concept of brazilian obnubilation, a term used by the author to explain the process of adaptation of the European man to the Brazilian tropical environment and the formation of brazilianness. Thus, we seek to explore the author's interpretation of the phenomenon of Brazilian obnubilation in relation to the backwoodsman. Our goal is to understand the ways in which the northern sertão was produced in the Brazilian literary culture of the nineteenth century and in the writings of Araripe Júnior. Trying to understand the discursive practices about the backlands in the production of Araripe Júnior goes through the search for power and knowledge relations that produced these images and these statements, which invented the northern backlands. To this end, we establish a theoretical dialogue with Pierre Bourdieu, Michel Foucault and Koselleck to address the relationship of the discursive practices of the author with the production of a given vision of the sertão of the North in 19th century Brazilian literature.