Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Brazil in the 1970s

1994; SAGE Publishing; Volume: 21; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1177/0094582x9402100105

1552-678X

Tânia Pellegrini, Sabrina E. Wilson,

Cultural, Media, and Literary Studies

In surveying critical analyses of recent Brazilian literary and cultural production, one cannot help but notice the dearth of critical attention with respect to the seventies. The preceding decade-the now nostalgic sixtiesis apparently perceived as a much more attractive area of study, with the creative, rebellious, and transformative potential of the Cinema Novo, the Popular Centers of Culture (Centros Populares de Cultura), the theatrical groups Oficina and Opiniao, and Chico Buarque de Holanda's musical poems offering an extremely promising cultural horizon. This near-silence forces one to consider what might lie behind it. The allegation that a lack of historical distance hinders proper objectivity is not sufficient reason for ignoring the question. From the viewpoint of the nineties, the seventies are now considered a moment of consolidation in a process that would leave its mark on everything that followed, opening up the field to new questions that demand answers. Without claiming to be exhaustive, this article proposes to outline the trends in Brazilian fiction during the seventies, analyzing them as reflections of a specific social, political, and economic situation. During this period a solid and sophisticated cultural industry began to emerge, exhibiting its own logic and dynamic and signaling a new stage in modes of cultural production. As we shall see, this industry, along with more immediate political factors, gradually left its imprint on literature, introducing significant formal and thematic changes. As examples I will use three narratives that achieved both critical and popular acclaim: Incidente em Antares, by the gaucho writer Erico Verissimo, Ignacio de Loyola Brandao's Zero, and 0 que e isso, companheiro? by the journalist Fernando Gabeira. These works, not by