Saussure e o (des) encontro de duas gerações acadêmicas no Brasil

Abstract

Saussure is considered by the authors of the linguistic history textbooks, both Europeans and Americans, as the great revolutionary of the twentieth century and he is unanimously appointed by the generations that succeeded him as the founder of “modern” linguistic discipline, strictly speaking. Admitting that a similar process has also happened in other academic circles, like the Brazilian one, the central question of this paper is to ask how Saussure was perceived and reported by the Brazilian researchers who have studied these issues in the first half of the twentieth century. How did the Brazilian academic community of that period interpret the relationship between philology and the Saussurean linguistic perspective? Our study material were mainly the reviews, the news, and, selectively, the research papers of the Brazilian philology and Brazilian linguistics journals published in the years before and immediately after the translation of the Course in general linguistics into Portuguese (1970).