The Future of the Word: Banal Futurism and Portuguese Journalism

Abstract

This article proposes a cultural history of a literary object, by describing the uses of the word futurism in the Portuguese public sphere during the 1920s and the 1930s. In this context, futurism became a meaningful referent in the experience of modernity, particularly of the massification and mechanization of sounds and images in the period. The first part of the article will guide us through the dominant representations of futurism by the literary intelligentsia, while in the second, we follow a specific group — a new generation of modernist journalists trying to secure a place in the canon of Portuguese modernism in the 1920s — in their creation of a true banal futurism, a ‘catchphrase’ used to negotiate dramatic historical transformations. Keywords. Futurism, journalism, mass culture, interwar period, intellectuals, literary canon.