Banca de DEFESA: MATHEUS AUGUSTO DE SANTANA MARQUES

“A BRAZIL FOR BRAZILIANS”: the intellectual project of Carolina Maria de Jesus

Brazilian Literature; Black intellectuality; Caroline Maria de Jesus

Carolina Maria de Jesus was a black Brazilian writer who expressed her intellectual project
mainly through literature, which justifies her relevance to national literature. What the text
delimits as Carolina Maria de Jesus's intellectual project is the aesthetically engendered
discourse of a Brazilian thinker. Weaving a multiform literary writing and crossed by poetic
experiments of popular and erudite origin, the thinker constitutes a style marked by lyrical and
moralizing diction, structured in defense of a subaltern class, at the same time that she organizes
a conception of the world and of Brazil. The dispersion of his work and the intermittency of its
reception interfere, even today, with the recognition of a robust system of ideas about the way
Brazil should be organized, choosing work, land and education as a path to enter his poetic
thought. The construction of the writer's intellectual project, the literary forms that this project
assumes, its main themes and the contributions of the thinker, as a public figure, in the Brazilian
cultural debate, reveal the project for the country of an intellectual writer dedicated to
understanding and contributing to the Brazilian reality.