A LYRIC IN THE PERIPHERY OF CAPITALISM: modernism and modernization in the work of Carlos Drummond de Andrade
Drummond; Modernism; Modernization; Poetry; Policy.
This thesis aims to investigate the relations between the modernization process of Brazilian society vis-à-vis the lyric and prose production of the natural poet of Itabira (MG), Carlos Drummond de Andrade, during the period in which the poet from Minas Gerais worked in the Ministry of Education and Public Health, as chief of staff of then-Minister Gustavo Capanema from 1934 to 1945. In these eleven years Drummond served within the bureaucratic apparatus of the Vargas dictatorship, until 1937 as a Provisional Government, and from 1937 to 1945, That is, the entire period of the Estado Novo, much has been discussed and written about these years of artistic and bureaucratic activity of the poet from Minas Gerais. However, few works follow a sociological orientation. In most cases the researches on the subject come from the Literary Criticism and the Social History. That is, the present study has sought to investigate, especially from the Social Sciences literature, the mechanisms that drove Drummond's work towards the conflicts between aesthetic modernism and the transformations inherent in the process of modernization of Brazilian society. These conflicts, which involved the sphere of the symbolic (aesthetic) along with ethics (politics and economics) were crossed by one of the most contradictory periods of Brazilian history, the Estado Novo, and Drummond was at the epicenter of the great transformations of that historical quarter. And his aesthetic-political engagement, hitherto raised, aimed at central questions for the formation of modern Brazil in both artistic and political spheres. Among the issues considered for their dual performance were: nationalism, Portuguese language, education, technology, war, communism, fascism, artistic heritage, health ... all these elements under the signs of modernism and the Brazilian modernization of period.