Oswald de Andrade he was a poet, novelist, playwright, journalist and teacher. He was one of the precursors of brazilian modernism. Had direct contact with the European vanguards from the beginning of the 20th century, in Paris, assimilating in his work several of the novelties that seethed in the European art world and bringing to Brazil new cultural horizons.
Ironic, provocative and political activist, was the creator of Brazilian modernist manifestos, as well as one of the most controversial personalities of his time. His name is directly related to the organization of the 1922 Modern Art Week, with the reformulation of what was considered art and literature in Brazil, and with the strengthening of national intellectuality.
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Biography of Oswald de Andrade
José Oswald de Sousa Andrade was born in São Paulo, on January 11, 1890, in a family of possessions. It was this family heritage that enabled him, still very young, in 1912, to spend a period in Europe, where he had contact with the Parisian student bohemia and with the
futurism Italian-French.![Oswald de Andrade is an important figure in the first phase of Modernism. [1]](/f/8b13bb7c78be83669b8fa225bef79447.jpg)
Graduated in Law in 1919, but started to act as literary journalist, writing for several newspapers, such as Correio Paulistano, Correio da Manhã, O Estado de São Paulo and Diário Popular.
it was, beside the friend Mario de Andrade, one of the main agitators of modernism in Brazil. With Mario, Anita Malfatti, Menotti del Picchia and Tarsila do Amaral, formed the call group of five, which articulated the 1922 Modern Art Week.
Between 1923 and 1934, he produced intensely in various literary genres — manifestos, poems, plays and a cycle of novels, all intensely linked to the modernist enterprise.
He married the painter Tarsila do Amaral in 1926, with whom he traveled to Europe several times, always immersed in Parisian artistic and intellectual circles. However, the Great Depression of 1929 and the Vargas' arrival to power in 1930 they led Oswald to lose a good part of his assets.
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In light of the political turmoil of the period, joined the Brazilian Communist Party (PCB), at the time the Communist Party of Brazil. His literary work then became more directly related to the social questions, with the anti-fascist and anti-capitalist struggle and with the agendas of the left in general.
Already divorced from Tarsila, he became involved with the writer Patrícia Galvão, with whom he founded, in 1931, the newspaper O Homem do Povo, a publication in which he manifested his communist activism and he satirized the hypocrisies of the São Paulo society of his time.
He broke with the PCB in 1945, when he obtained the title of associate professor at the University of São Paulo, with the thesis The crisis of messianic philosophy.
He died in São Paulo on October 22, 1954.
Literary Characteristics of Oswald de Andrade
Experimental, visionary and multiple, Oswald de Andrade's literature is directly linked to the figure of the cosmopolitan writer, who lived, analyzed and satirized a society in constant transformation. It was influenced by the European vanguards, mainly by the Cubism and by Dadaism, combined with a commitment to an art that not only absorbs foreign influences, but also consolidates a truly Brazilian production.
They are style traits from Oswald's work to irony it's the humor, linked to a sharp and amusing historical perception, which frequently addresses the issue of the (de) colonization of Brazil and America. syntactic breaks and with the canon of the past, fragmentary texts, colloquial language, collages and parodies are also features of his literature. In the words of Alfredo Bosi, “the junction of modernism and primitivism that, in the final analysis, defines Oswald's worldview and poetics”|1|.
Haroldo de Campos characterizes the poetic work of Oswald de Andrade as radical, as it takes up the root of poetic making: language. It is for the resumption of language as a social product that Oswald breaks with the old canon of Brazilian poetry, which until then clung to a rhetorical, narrow-minded, restrained, oligarchic intellectuality. Sewing people's speech to written language, the author revolutionizes Brazilian literary practice, freeing poetry from being “caste jargon”, a diploma of intellectuality and refinement of I like.
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Main works
- Manifests
Pau-Brasil Manifesto (1924);
Anthropophagic manifest (1928).
- Poetry
Brazilwood (1925);
Student Oswald de Andrade's first poetry notebook (1927);
collected poetry (1945).
- theater
the man and the horse (1943);
The dead; the king of the candle (1937).
- Prose
Sentimental Memories of João Miramar(1924);
Seraphim Ponte Grande(1933);
The Exile Trilogy: The condemned (1922), absinthe star (1927) and the red ladder (1934);
Ground zero I - melancholic revolution (1943);
Ground Zero II - floor (1946).
Oswald de Andrade and modernism
THE consolidation of the modernist project in Brazil it was the main guiding axis of Oswald's literature. All the efforts undertaken by the author sought the new Sun of modernism, which would free Brazilian literature from the jocular and strictly academic tone of the parnassianism, in addition to solidifying the ground to flourish a truly national art, which was not a distant echo of the artistic movements in vogue in Europe.
While Mário de Andrade was considered the great intellectual mentor of the first modernism, Oswald is considered the great man of movement action. He was the author of the two main modernist manifestos: the Pau-Brasil Manifesto, from 1924, in which he defends his desire for Brazilian poetry to become a cultural export product, as it was, historically, the Pau-Brasil tree, proposing a revolutionary poetry that escaped the mimetic pattern in vogue in era; it's the man-eating manifesto or anthropophagic, of 1928, with even more political content, defending the proposal of anthropophagy, that is, Brazilian art should swallow the inevitable foreign influence, eliminating what doesn't matter and generating something completely new, pure and primitive.
Image credit
[1]National Archives
Grades
|1| BOSI, A. Concise History of Brazilian Literature. 18. ed. São Paulo: Cultrix, 2018. P. 385.
by Luiza Brandino
Literature teacher
