ABSTRACT
Primitivism is a crucial feature of Brazilian modernism and it has in Oswald de Andrade's work one of its major expressions. The "pau brasil poetry" and "anthropophagy" resorted primitivism to, as Oswald de Andrade said, set the hands of Brazilian literature to the time of universal literature. The idea was to overcome the felling of delay and the necessity of a national identity; anthropophagy was a metaphor for a culture that was characterized by the persistent absorption and transmutation of foreign models. The aim of this paper is to explore the meanings and ambiguities that primitivism has assumed in some of the best moments of Oswald de Andrade's modernism also in dialogue with its presence in the European avant-gardes.
KEYWORDS:
Primitivism; Oswald de Andrade; avant-garde