“NEITHER HELL NOR PARADISE": DALCÍDIO JURANDIR, AN APPRENTICE IN PURGATORY
Dalcídio Jurandir; Trajectory; Amazonian Modernism; Regionalism
The subject of this dissertation is the social trajectory of Dalcídio Jurandir (1909-1979). Therefore, we will look at how Dalcídio Jurandir's social aging occurs in the Brazilian literary field and, with this, the reconstruction of the successive positions assumed by the writer throughout his career. The focus is on the aspects of Dalcídio Jurandir's intellectual practice and productions that explain his literary ostracism at the end of his life: his origins in a symbolically dominated region and his involvement in communist militancy. The aim was to reconstruct the complex web of historical, social and biographical coordinates that not only allowed Dalcídio to be included in the novel, but also conditioned the literary survival strategies he adopted in a context of political tensions from 1940 onwards. The conclusions of this dissertation, therefore, cover both the ways in which Dalcídio Jurandir constructed a specific position within Rio's literary milieu, understood in the light of the constraints of a literary man who was “provincial in every sense”, and the ways in which this career is intertwined with key dilemmas for understanding the relationship between literary men and the wider political life of the 1940s and 1950s.