Fracture, resistance, parody: history and aesthetics in three poets in Dictatorial Brazil (Ana C., Polari, Leminski)

Abstract

By method, pressed by space, I will look for movements that, synthetically, point out the way in which three poems dialogued with the post-64 Brazilian dictatorial situation. To do so, I will appropriate concepts – parody, fracture, resistance – that try to account for aspects that, formally and ideologically, structure such works in the face of a perverse authoritarian context. So different from each other, the poems – by Paulo Leminski, Ana Cristina Cesar and Alex Polari – nevertheless bring unusual affinities. The thesis, therefore, becomes: in addition to values frozen in canons or margins, the “tension between meaning and form” is taken as a criterion for aesthetic judgment, thus accepting that “literary value cannot be theoretically substantiated” : it is a limit of theory, not of literature” (Compagnon, 2001: 229; 255).