Capítulos de uma revolução: Memórias póstumas de Brás Cubas

Abstract

This article analyses, how, in Machado de Assis’s Memórias póstumas de Brás Cubas, literary novelty results in part from the transposition of rhetorical and poetic aspects from writing for newspapers. In the nineteenth century, journalistic writing—besides being practiced by men of letters—was (re)invented based on the repository of forms that literature offered. Machado de Assis, thanks to his constant contact with writing for newspapers and magazines, took advantage of some of their characteristics in his own literary creations: the plasticity of the newspaper page, the circulation between texts within the medium of the magazine, a range between fiction and the referentiality created by the press’s textual and representational systems. The fragmented structure that both built upon and dictated the modern sensibility was read as art and parody by Machado de Assis’s literary writing as he was an artist especially sensitive to the relation between the writing of his texts and their medium and vehicles.