The modernity of the short stories by João Alphonsus and Marques Rebelo

Abstract

About two hundred short story books were published in the 1930’s in the Brazilian Southeast states of Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo and Minas Gerais, most of them following traditional themes and structures inherited from Romanticism, founder of the genre in the country, or from the realist and naturalist currents of the century XIX. However, in times of world conflicts, internal political revolutions and intense artistic movement – especially those ones from the first quarter of the twentieth century which were consolidated by the Modern Art Week – some Brazilian intellectuals and artists strived to improve structural changes in both sociopolitical and artistic champs. Believing that a new Brazil could only be constructed from a new thought and a new aesthetic expression, such writers as João Alphonsus (1901-1944) and Marques Rebelo (1907-1973) dedicated themselves to a modern and urban lyricism, being considered by critics of their time inventors of the modern brazilian tale. Although these authors have achieved considerable success in 1931, with the publication of Galinha cega and Oscarina, respectively, shortly thereafter, thanks to the enthusiastic literary criticism of regionalist novels, they have been losing visibility and public along the twentieth century. His works rarely circulate today, having survived thanks to the tale “Galinha cega”, homonymous with the book of João Alphonsus, which appears in several anthologies, and the film transpositions of some texts by Marques Rebelo. In this sense, this essay analyzes the importance of these authors in the panorama of the Brazilian tale, highlighting their offer of everyday themes, banal or surprising, popular characters, automata or reflective, federal capital’s urban scenarios, Rio de Janeiro, or new capital of Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte, and the language desirous of a genuinely Brazilian expression.