Coutinho's Controversy: The Debate Over the Nova Crítica

Abstract

The arena of Brazilian literary criticism during the 1950s was one of heated polemics and angry debates between the “old” and the “new” critics. In many ways, this protracted encounter involved a clash of world views as much as of concepts of literature and criticism. For one thing, the opponents of the nova crítica had a wholly different cast of mind from the new critics. Whether they utilized the reigning impressionistic or sociological approaches to literature and criticism, or whether they were merely dilettantes who dabbled in letters at their leisure, they all tended to view literature in other than a literary framework. To the new critics, this orientation was the same thing as saying that literature was only a satellite responding to the gravitational pull of other forms of knowledge—history, sociology, or psychology, for example. Its main function, therefore, was to illuminate the style of an epoch or the personality of the author, even that of the critic himself. Such a concept of literature was totally unacceptable to the new critics, who insisted on regarding literature in its own right, as a separate but equal planet in the universe of the intellect. Further, the new and the old critics locked horns over the measure of importance that subjective considerations should be allotted in literary criticism. The former wished to minimize them dramatically, maintaining that criticism was a rational, objective discipline; while the latter objected strenuously to such minimization, holding that criticism was primarily an exercise of the critic's creative imagination. The debate over subjective and objective attitudes in literary study is part of the broader issue of the relative merits of the modern, scientific mode of thought and the traditional, personalist mode that had characterized Brazilian literary criticism.