Misplaced Ideas: Essays on Brazilian Culture

by Roberto Schwarz, John Gledson (Editor)

How can Latin Americans understand their past? Do ideologies which have been imported from Europe necessarily distort their view, or is that to underrate the power and objectivity of the ideas themselves? These questions are at the heart of this selection of essays, spanning twenty years of critical work on history, culture and identity, by one of the foremost Latin American intellectuals of our time. Roberto Schwarz’s writings have had a profound effect throughout Latin America. This is the first volume of those writings to appear in English. 

Taking its title from what has probably been Schwarz’s most influential essay, Misplaced Ideas  first examines the slave-owning Brazil of the nineteenth century, to show the persistent gap between liberal ideology based on the free market, and the reality of forced labour. The essays which follow range across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and across film and fiction, theatre and music. They include four pieces on the great novelist Machado de Assis, and a powerful essay on the sometimes bizarre ways Brazilian culture reacted to the imposition of military rule. Throughout, Schwarz continually demonstrates the wit and sharpness which make his writings both a challenge and a pleasure to read.

Genres: Nonfiction, Brazil, Theory, Literature

224 pages, Paperback

First published September 17, 1992

About the author

Roberto Schwarz é um crítico literário e professor aposentado de Teoria Literária brasileiro. Um dos principais continuadores do trabalho crítico de Antonio Candido, redigiu estudos sobre Machado de Assis elencados entre os mais representativos na fortuna crítica sobre o autor das "Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas".

Reviews

[Yuri Ferreira · Rating 3 out of 5]

desafogando a fera

[Luiz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Roberto Schwarz is a culture critic and thinker. Privileged for his Austrian heritage and his refined culture and biased by his critical theory. He realizes what Levi-Strauss denounced in Tristes Tropiques: The emptiness of a society. The digestion a authentic Brazilian identity is slowed by a self-denying and alienated culture. Brazil is named as cheap commodity (Pau-Brasil) where colonizers mostly from Latin Europe came in other to rob the land from the indigenous and put African slaves to work in the stolen land. Slave society was probably more perverse than Feudalist Russia, but how cultural and willingness of westernization evolved have some similarities. Despite Machado de Assis is not comparable to Dostoevsky, the author notices the grandeur of this great Brazilian writer, and his visions on the country is ahistorical lost in space and time while the XIX century social, political and technological developments unfolds. Like today, Brazil still lives in the past far from the enlightenment and the social upheavals that shook more civilized cultures in Europe. According to Schwarz, Assis through his cynical realism tries to replicate the experience of living in a country that is ideals peacefully get along with a much different reality. Brazil was country was created by mercantilist appetite in Europe where countries that were launched fast material accumulation through sucking resources from satellite colonies. The Brazilian consciousness is formed similarly like Peter's Great Russia, a huge country, unequal with a very powerful aristocracy composed of rentiers (landowners that stole big chunks of land with fraudulent papers, bankers and the senior State officer in the executive, parliament and justice) and, of course, lobbyists (politicians). He calls attention for the fact that after the Coup of 1964 a new culture was generated in order to deliver cultural comfort (while the free world was having the 1960s liberation) and the silliness and the infantile Brazilian way were manifest in the Tropicalia and Jose Celso's Oficina. According to Schwarz they were just shallow cultural expression based on bourgeois need to have a superfluous contact with art in times that the Brazilian aristocratic society was having a dictatorship which prevented liberty and thus true Art. In the era of mass media, the Brazilian dictatorship were keen to not only censor but also reward those media outlets that would Politically conservative + Liberal Economic Policies that made the super riches even more richer and the poor less poor. The modernization of a country led a Fascist inspired Military Junta was a hoax since it is excuse was to eliminate foreign ideas such as Marxism. How a nationalist military coup sponsored by CIA and aligned with conservative-liberal values was imbued to launch Brazil into modernity. Obviously, it was catastrophe.

[Eduardo Lima · Rating 4 out of 5]

coletânea de ensaios maravilhosa de um dos críticos mais inteligentes e impressionantes desse país. adorei, especialmente, "O sentido histórico da crueldade em Machado de Assis" e "Nacional por subtração". o que ele enxerga nas narrativas e nas obras do Machado, especialmente, é impressionante, sempre encontrando o substrato da realidade violenta do capitalismo no Brasil.

[Abbie O'Hara · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really amazing Brazilian Marxist literary criticism - the main thesis is that Brazilian countries suffer from being on the edges of western bourgeois culture by trying to emulate capitalist liberalism. But these ideas aren’t immanent or naturally occurring to their indigenous culture which was, for a long time, controlled by the thriving slave trade and slave economy. Therefore the values of liberal capitalism were used ornamentally by the upper class to justify their superiority to lower classes. By inspecting this dynamic in Brazil, we can see the fragility and speciousness of western liberalism

[álvaro · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excelente coletânea de ensaios de um dos maiores críticos literários que esse país ja teve. Meus textos favoritos foram: “As Ideias Fora do Lugar”e “Nacional por Subtração”. Após a leitura é impossível não olhar para nossa realidade e não enxergar a permanecia de vários preceitos analisados pelo autor nos ensaios, principalmente com relação ao passado escravista brasileiro.

[Haymone Neto · Rating 4 out of 5]

O ensaio que dá título à coletânea é uma referência nos estudos sobre Machado de Assis e vale a leitura do conjunto. Acho que o livro é uma boa introdução ao pensamento de um dos intelectuais mais consagrados na interpretação contemporânea do Brasil, mas nem sempre é fácil acompanhá-lo.

[Bianca Pinto · Rating 5 out of 5]

um manual do brasil