O português brasileiro em Mário de Andrade pelo viés da análise de discurso

Abstract

This study investigated Mario de Andrade’s discourse in relation to the creation of a Brazilian linguistic identity, focusing on the writer’s position in the so called polemic between modernists and conservatives, between the 1920s and 1940s, supported by the theoretical and methodological referential of the French discourse analysis, mainly by the concepts of interdiscourse (and its correlates) and discursive ethos, as operationalized by Dominique Maingueneau (1989, 1997, 2005a, 2005b, 2008a, 2008b, 2010, 2011). The discursive corpus was extracted from the archive of texts that comprise the author’s work, distributed

among several genres, such as: poetry, essays, criticism, romances, short- stories, chronicles, journalistic articles, folklore studies, including letters sent to

friends with whom he discussed about the Brazilianisms to which he wanted to give status of erudite, cultured, civilized speech. The study aimed to capture the meanings assigned by Mario de Andrade to the linguistic event that, from the beginning of colonization, was engendering a language or a norm that was breaking the Lusophony kingdom. Besides, it sought to understand the operation of the discursive ethos in the marioandradina enunciation as a participant of a historical controversy in the field of Letters in the Brazilian discursive universe. On the horizon envisioned by Mario, nationalism emerged as significant, if, and only if, set apart from the regionalism and integrated to the internationalism that governed his desire to project Brazil in the concert of the universal civilized culture. The reading of the discursive corpus reveals the convergence of Mario’s pre-discursive and discursive ethos with the ethos of the modernist ethnic community with regard to militancy, revolt, fight against academic aesthetics, traditionalism, imposition of the Lusitanian linguistic pattern etc. However, it also brings to light Mario’s divergence of ethos in relation to the modernist ethos whether to behave as a mere ideologist of the movement or to behave as an experimenter, a craftsman, a real worker of the modernist mission, in São Paulo and in Brazil of the first decades of the XX century, amid the Parnassian, Symbolist and Regionalist movements to name a few. In this sense, Mario’s literary work is a demonstration, or better, a display of the ethos of courage.