Modernidade e modernização em O selvagem da ópera e A máquina de madeira

Abstract

This work aims to analyze the modernity and modernization representations in two works of Brazilian contemporary literature: O selvagem da ópera (1994), by Rubem Fonseca, and A máquina de madeira (2012), by Miguel Sanches Neto. Both one book and the other one challenge the Brazil of the Second Empire by criticizing its social, technological and cultural policies in an attempt to overcome the obstacles relegated by the colonial and enslaver rule. From this perspective, it invests in the protagonists’ trajectory: the composer Antônio Carlos Gomes and the typewriter inventor, a priest named Francisco João de Azevedo. The black blood of the former and the humble origins of both function as paradigms of this Brazil which wants to modernize, but which does not fit into an imported, Eurocentric model. On the basis of the study, the novel genre is contemplated in the Bakhtinian conception and its ties to the consolidation of the bourgeois class, dialoguing with the reading offered by some critics of modernity like Marshall Berman and Antony Giddens. Among the romanesque expressions, historical fiction is privileged, for its more intimate dialogue with the discourse of history, theorized by György Lukács. The Roberto Schwarz and Silviano Santiago readings, as well as Thomas Skidmore and Lilia Moritz Schwarcz historiographical studies, will guide the work regarding the Brazilian society of the nineteenth century.