José Veríssimo: seus anos de formação (1877-1891)

Abstract

The work, “José Veríssimo: His formative years (1877 to 1891)”, is about the intellectual production of this Amazonian thinker in his years in Pará, from 1877 to 1891. It aims to comprehend the critic’s thought – how he introduces and integrates the Amazon in the intellectual setting of the time, based on ethnographic, literary and educational themes that started in the Belenian press and which culminated in works that marked the first expressions of his thought. Using a qualitative bibliographic research method, the thesis was based on studies of hermeneutics by Friedrich Schleiermacher (1999), on the aesthetics of reception by Hans Robert Jauss (1979), on the paratextuality presented by Gerard Genette (1982), on the history of book by Roger Laufer (1980[1972]) and Robert Darnton (1995), the narratological studies by Wolf Schmid (2010) and the reception of pragmatic texts by Karlheinz Stierle (1979). Regarding the reception of José Veríssimo's anthology, the reading of Franklin Távora (1883), Silvio Romero (1980), Machado de Assis (1899), Francisco Prisco (1937), João Alexandre Barbosa (1974) and Felipe Tavares de Moraes (2018). Data analysis revealed that in the three themes in which the Obidense intellectual moved - Ethnographic, Literary and Educational - the critic brought to the debate issues of popular culture, politics, art, women, mestizaje, the indigenous, the black, from the working class, religion, housing, language, folklore, economy, among others, introducing, as an Amazonian thinker, a need for representation and interest in the building of a national intellectual project. It was noticed, in turn, that the reception of works is organized in several fields of knowledge, through which readers update the works and seek to understand the historical roots of the country and the formation of the critical language of the author of Scenes from Amazonian Life (1886).