Modernisms and resistance to modernization

Mademoiselle Cinema, conservative thinking and the possible modernity south of capitalism.

Abstract

I develop this article with the purpose of outlining an answer, through the novel Mademoiselle Cinema: novella de costumes do momento que passa (1922) by Benjamin Costallat, to the question of this Dossier. That is, “what reflections and evaluations about the projects and utopias of Brazil can be made from the Brazilian political, social and aesthetic thought, instilled by these historical events and at the current crossroads in which the country finds itself?” I intend to develop my arguments through a sociological analysis of the form of the novel. That is, as a key to the reflection of certain groups on social processes in step with “the very way in which different classes, with different points of view, converge in a concrete historical situation” (WAIZBORT, 2007, p.67). In this argumentative course, I will try to observe in what directions the intellectual conditions for the development of a conservative critique of Brazilian republican modernization were realized, expressed in this novel as a heuristic object of reflection. And, above all, how it supported the social processes themselves in the midst of the cultural dynamisms that had their symbolic catalyst in 1922.