As polêmicas intelectuais entre final do século XIX e início do século XX : literatura e retórica nas raízes do beletrismo brasileiro

Abstract

The Brazilian eighteenth century is deeply marked by literary polemics in newspapers and magazines. Moreover, polemicism is an outstanding feature of our literature. Polemics is a harsh rivalry between writers, which was born to inflame great passions. Polemics, therefore, was the entertainment of the intellectuals of the time. Thus, the motto of this work consists in scrutinizing the essence of polemic.The polemicists always aimed at the reactions of the public and the reception of the debate in order to achieve communication with the reader. Thus, in the same way that novelists publicized their books, polemicists also used the press as a means of spreading their names and ideas. (VENTURA, 1991, p. 148). Hence, besides the newspaper establishing itself as a powerful means of disseminating news, it was through it that Brazilian intellectuals expressed their ideas in the late nineteenth century. Some answers can be anticipated: Brazilian belletrism, since its beginnings, launched combat literature fomented by a satirical-provocative content; the tropical intellectual, entangled in Lusitanisms, Gallicisms and Germanisms had managed to sketch a theory of polemics that needs to be complemented. The present study seeks, from a historical method, the handling of direct sources, such as dictionaries, periodicals and Brazilian manuals, ephemerides, obituaries as well as indirect sources, to analyze the notion of polemic as an argumentation strategy that proliferated in the Brazilian press by scholars between 1870 and 1911.Thus, the analysis of the writings of Romero and Tobias from the end of the 19th century and even the studies about literary life of the period show the presence of vast polemical work, which became a structuring feature of the intellectual production of the period, transforming "quiet intellectuals into warriors of the word".(BUENO; ERMAKOFF, 2005, p. 08)