O SUBLIME E O GROTESCO NA POESIA INDIANISTA BRASILEIRA

Abstract

Due to the proximity between Brazil’s formal independence and the rise of romanticism in the country, this aesthetic is symptomatic of how literature acted in the invention of a national identity in which heterogeneous groups would be unified in monolithic fictional representations. Considering this backdrop, this article examines literary representations of Brazilian indigenous people in the light of the concepts of the sublime and the grotesque, comparing the Indianist poetics of Gonçalves Dias, in line with ufanist nationalism, and the counterpoint poetics of Bernado Guimarães. In a hermeneutic informed by literary comparatism, we observed in these representations that the schism between ethereal idealization, linked to the sublime, and scatological ridicule, relatated to the grotesque, implied a parodic reworking of Gonçalves Dias’ patriotic discourse by a counter-discourse shaped by Rabelaisian humour, in which the deconstruction promoted by pantagruelic comicality points out, through laughter, the incongruity of official narratives.