Avoiding the digital insanity: the attachment to constructivism in Brazilian literature

Andréa Catrópa, Gilbertto Pradoi

How to build a nation from words? My hypothesis in this paper is that the constructive role of
the written text in Brazilian culture has been holding back its experiments on digital literature.

Ever since its inception, the relationship between Brazil and literature has been quite peculiar.
Colonized by Portugal, which had a substantial literary history, the circulation of books and the
establishment of the press has been forbidden until century XIX. The legal flow of texts,
therefore, occurred shortly before the Brazilian independence in 1822. This fact linked literary
expression to the idea of building a nation, especially until the mi ddle of the 20th century

Although some local poets have been distinguished by its satirical and irreverent spirit, it is
common to find between the Brazilian writers what the critic Antonio Candido called the
"tradição empenhada." (“committed tradition”). This term defined a kind of engagement that
sought to reflect in the literary text social utopias.

In the 1950s, the Brazilian concrete poetry movement published avant-garde manifestos and
inaugurated, on national context, a tradition of poetry that dialogue with Arts and Design. The
concrete poets, who related creation to theory, were targeted both for admiration and for
rejection. In the last case, critics thought their work suffered from “excessive
internationalization."

Concrete poetry´s experimentalism, however, was intimately related to the period of

accelerated transformation of the country towards urbanization and industrialization; but it was
not restricted to that. Poetic concretism also was a response to the trauma of a colonized
country whose "literary fashions" always came in the wake of what was fashionable abroad.

According to Charles Perrone, concrete Brazilian poetry helped “to reconfigure the nation in
cultural terms.” Moreover, we believe that this movement foreshadowed future events that
would become widely diffused in the digital era: the enhancement of word materiality, the
spatial organization of the verses, the use of sounds and colors as elements of poetic creation.

Our perspective, however, is that these proposals were not dissociated from the constructive
parameters related to the mission of building a nation. And that this tendency generates a lack
of resonance of the "inconsequently experimental" literary movements like SpamPoetry, Flarf
Poetry, and Conceptualism, which makes the Brazilian digital literature still predominantly
follow the concrete verbivocovisual tradition.

i Universidade Anhembi Morumbi PPG Design – São Paulo - Brazil