The heritage of Modernism during the avant-garde crisis

the minute poem in the global village and colloquial speech in globalized everyday life

Abstract

The paper investigates how literary and political mutations occurred in the last decades of the 20^th century – the crisis or the announcement of the end of avant-garde, the pluralization of possible poetics, the redemocratization and ruin of the national-developmentalist pact – transformed the way one considers, perhaps until today, Brazilian modernism. By analyzing poems by Paulo Leminski and Sebastião Uchoa Leite, we will find strategies that re-articulate some central vectors of modernist poetics (the tension between expression and construction, colloquiality, anti-lyricism and minute-poems) within a literary field marked by the decompression of cultural life, with a growing publishing market, the end of dictatorial censorship and the emergence of political issues on ethnicity, sexuality, gender. Thus, the dilemmas of national modernization (modernism’s core) are overdetermined by heterogeneous historicities, scales, and demands of these new factors.