ANTONIO CANDIDO: SHADES OF A FORMATIVE PROCESS AND THE PROBLEMATIC HORIZON OF THE NATION

Abstract

A literary critic, social thinker and political activist, Antonio Candido is one of the most important Brazilian thinkers. His criticism remains valid because it is a model produced to be revised and rethought with each new moment, with each new work, case by case. This text aims to show the importance of his work as a decisive element in the debate about the Brazilian formative process both in its cultural aspects and in its horizon of nation formation. In order to do this, we seek, in his research and in his texts on Machado de Assis, to understand how this process of constitution and consolidation of Brazilian Literature took place, a kind of narrative of the desire of the Brazilians to have a literature, established in Machado, and that, in another key, from Candido, managed to build the narrative of the desire to create a Brazilian critical tradition.