The Chronicle of Benjamim Costallat: A New Literature Idea for the Expansion of the Reader Public Through Carioca Newspapers in the 1920’s

Abstract

This article discusses the production of Benjamim Costallat as a columnist for newspapers in Rio de Janeiro (carioca newspapers) in the 1920s who, in dialogue with discussions held in Europe, especially by Futurism, took on a project to expand the readership of literature among us, mitigating the effects of a conservative modernization practiced by the rulers of the Old Republic. Costallat conceived that, alongside the urbanization of the early 20th century, there was a change in the sensibility of the new large urban agglomerations. This idea sets his texts, ushering in his chronicles a language marked by speed and image in the new city scenery, unprecedented in the Brazilian literary universe. The article intends to address how the chronicler works opposing the traditional concept of culture and literature, giving rise to an important aesthetic rupture in Brazil which implied - in addition to an exclusive renewal of artistic language - the use of new media, such as newspapers and new technologies, such as cinema. Costallat's production constitutes a new literary manifestation in the 1920s that should not be strictly evaluated according to the aesthetic criteria adopted by canonical modernist criticism. It is necessary to analyze these texts, from other perspectives, which escape the conventionality of traditional art categories under penalty of denying the reinvention of an avant-garde practice in Brazil that sheds light on the incongruities of an authoritarian modernization project among us.