The objective of this lecture is to analyze different impressions of the young republic, especially during its early years. After all, tradition confused itself with modernity, and the new and the old merged. And it was among these paradoxes and conflicts that the "Modern Art Week" took place- a blow of avant-garde, cosmopolitanism, and certain optimism in this context - but also other social experiences with a political vindication backdrop. In this sense, I dare to show some of the experience of Lima Barreto. I do not intend to make it an example that highlights an entire era, and even less "to spoil the party" of the year of 2012. Rather, it represents a "different case", a different face of the same modernity. Perhaps it serves as testimony to the atmosphere that devastated part of the Brazilian intellectuals from the beginning of the century, who were increasingly skeptical of the path this nation was taking, and in this particular case, were highly impacted by the discourse of racial determinists, who, after the abolition of slavery, began to establish a new type of "inequality", grounded in biology.
Lima Barreto; Science; Madness; First Republic