Raízes do Paraíso : uma análise whiteana de Sérgio Buarque de Holanda

Abstract

More than Chico's father, Sérgio Buarque de Holanda was one of the main Brazilian thinkers of the twentieth century that produced literary criticism and formulated singular interpretations on the History of Brazil. He had published many books with theses still relevant. In his debut work, Roots of Brazil (1936), he argued that the Brazilian is the cordial man, and this is not related to good manners. His most academically rigorous book was Visão do Paraíso (1959), in this book Holanda studied how the European people had a vision of America as Eden. The purpose of this research is to analyze these two works in a way that would allow us to understand the historiographical style of the author and define the form of historical understanding that he possessed. The intention is to apply Hayden White's Theory of Historical Work, that he presented in Meta-History (1973). The purpose is both to investigate at the level of the structure of the narrative what the tropological elements chosen by the Holanda, in turn, that it inform us about his historical awareness, as well as to verify the applicability and the functionality of the Hayden White’s Theory. The idea is that if White was able to analyze tropologically classical authors of the nineteenth century, it is possible and feasible also to analyze the work of other authors by a theoretical and methodological form similar to that he applied in MetaHistory.