Pathways between literature and history

Abstract

THIS ESSAY summarizes the author's itinerary as historian of Brazilian literature, theoretician of poetry and scholar of our cultural heritage. The initial moments of this career merit special attention: the study of Croce's aesthetics, the first acquaintance with Gramsci's Marxist philosophy, the influence of Christian Existentialism in the late 1950s, and the political engagement in leftist politics in Brazil in the 1960s and 70s. As professor of Italian Literature, the author has written theses on Pirandello and Leopardi, which remain unpublished. As a student of literary history, in the wake Otto Maria Carpeaux's work, the author examines the dialectic relationships between ideology and poetry, and ideology and prose, which led to his concept of literature as resistance. When writing the Dialectics of Colonization, he immersed himself in the study of the tensions that distinguish the history of ideologies in Brazil.