As part of Brazilian Modernism, it is José Oswald Nogueira de Andrade, born in São Paulo and son of a wealthy family, he attended the Escola Modelo Caetano de Campos, the Ginásio Nossa Senhora do Carmo and Colégio de São Bento, who graduated in humanities in 1908, the year he met the poet Guilherme de Almeida.
In 1922, the year in which the Modern Art Week, debuted with the novel “Os Condenados”, when he also married Tarsila do Amaral, his ally in the foundation of the Movement Anthropophagic, one of the manifestos of the modernist era that consisted of the idea of “swallowing” all literature that was not authentically Brazilian.
His second novel was Sentimental Memories of João Miramar, structured in 163 episodes and built in the form of flashes, with a cinematographic composition technique, mixing poetry, prose, letters, diaries, excerpts from journalistic chronicles. This technique was innovative for the time.
His work was the only one that encompassed all the modernist characteristics, as he managed, with his art, to transgress, polemicize, break parameters pre-established by other literary movements. He was also the author of poetry, plays and a literary critic.
Among his innovative spirit was the ability to transform texts from the colonial era into critical and ironic poems, precisely to to denounce the repudiation of the Portuguese, as a form of denying the past, thus portraying the “social” side of the country of that era. So let's see some of his creations:
Pero Vaz de Caminha
Discovery
We made our way through this sea of long
Until the octave of Easter
we top birds
And we had land views
The wildlings
They showed them a chicken
they were almost afraid of her
And they didn't want to put the hand
And then they took her as amazed
first tea
after dancing
Diogo Dias
made the real jump
Oswald de Andrade
verb to crack
I impoverish all of a sudden
you get rich because of me
it blues to the backlands
we filed for bankruptcy
you protest by preference
They scatter the dough.
be pirate
thirst muggles
opening the visor
healthy staff
I wish I had known
That this verb was irregular
We can note that the author uses grammatical resources to denounce a social situation, in which the social inequality was already present at that time - “I suddenly become impoverished, You enrich because of my cause".
A determining factor is also the issue of colloquial language, a characteristic feature of the modern period, as well as the predominance of free verses.
Do not stop now... There's more after the advertising ;)
By Vânia Duarte
Graduated in Letters
Would you like to reference this text in a school or academic work? Look:
DUARTE, Vânia Maria do Nascimento. "Oswald de Andrade and the Modernist era"; Brazil School. Available in: https://brasilescola.uol.com.br/literatura/oswald-andrade-era-modernista.htm. Accessed on June 27, 2021.