What will Brazil be when it grow up? The imaginary about the national development in the Brazilian coming of age novels of the twentieth century.
Bildungsroman, Bildung, Coming of age novel, National development
The following work aims to investigate how the Brazilian novel (Bildungsroman) participates in the construction
of the imaginary about the development of Brazil during a period of its national construction. To this end, it is an important
assumption that literature absorbed, created and shared symbols that support reflection on Brazilian modernity in its
specificity. The formative novel is the plot/narrative form that was responsible for representing individual development in civilizational molds of Western Europe, when it elevated modern forms of social control to a universal category.
Therefore, we will investigate how the literary imagination and sociological imagination operated within the limits of a
teleology intrinsic to the idea of formation. Both seem to be nourished by the idea that the culture or identity of a nation or
individual contains an internal, original meaning that determines its evolution. We intend to investigate the hypothesis that
the formative novel as a narrative form, as it has its roots in a conception of national historical time, has incorporated into
its structure an ideology of progress. It seems to us our object requires an investigation on two fronts, the analysis of extra-
literary material that allows us to place them in an ideologically charged intellectual environment, in the midst of political
events that mobilized the class of writers, and the textual analysis of the works, which they are products of the elaboration
carried out by them of themes coming from the “real”. The works analyzed will be: Através do Brasil, O ateneu, O ciclo da
cana de açúcar, Macunaíma, Amar verbo Transitivo, Perto do coração selvagem, A hora da estrela, Mundos Mortos,
Quarup.