Brazil After History, or Two German Accounts of Postwar Brazilian Literature

Abstract

This paper interrogates the claims of the German theorists Max Bense (1910–1990) and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht (1948–) that they perceived in Brazilian art and literature a tropical temporality, defined by a constructed existence outside linear (“European”) history. As he wrote in his Brasilianische Intelligenz: Eine cartesianische Reflexion(1965), Max Bense, a Stuttgart-based philosopher of aesthetics and technology, found in Brazil's modernist capital, said to have been built ex nihilo in the late 1950s, an unprecedented fusion of design and politics that upended historical models of aesthetic valuation. As Bense applied his informational aesthetics to his study of Concrete poetry, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, in hisAfter 1945: Latency as Origin of the Present (2013), uses a post-hermeneutical method to denude João Cabral de Melo Neto's poetry of historical and semantic depth. Ultimately this paper argues that in their autobiographical accounts of travels to Brazil both authors betray a tendency to equate Brazil with an “otherness,” thereby displacing onto Brazilian culture another indication that, from the European perspective, its dream of itself persists.