Os anos de formação de Drummond e a experiência de uma modernidade periférica

Abstract

This master's thesis aims to analyze the literary production of Carlos Drummond de Andrade during the 1920s to investigate the formative process of the writer before the publication of his first book, Alguma poesia (1930). Through a comparison between literary criticism, chronicle, poetry and epistolography, the goal is to understand the main concerns confronted by the writer, who made efforts to establish himself in the public sphere by publishing numerous texts in newspapers and magazines of the period. Confronted with the difficult reality of literary tradition in Brazil, it is noteworthy that Drummond elaborated a critical solution to the challenge of formulating a national literature, which, far from conforming to the ideas in vogue, highlights a specificity of his work and of modernism in Minas Gerais. The texts from that period, when examined collectively, reveal that the development of a poetic persona, as well as the first work, was a non-linear process characterized by ruptures and continuities. In this poetics, the investigation focuses on how melancholy resides within the ambiguous constitution of the modern subject, which is formulated in the face of a profoundly contradictory process of modernization, placed as the center of its own personal history, to which the subject turns in an often corrosive way.