Prudente de Moraes, neto and the cultural policy of the Estado Novo

Abstract

This article aims to demonstrate some outcomes of the works of
Prudente de Moraes, neto and his pseudonym Pedro Dantas related to the
cultural policies of the Brazilian Estado Novo (1937-1945). In this sense, his
essays of nationality, as well as his texts published in the Cultura Política review,
at the same time that seek to affirm the Brazilian cultural formation, can
also have its discontinuities evidenced in metaphors, as the one of throwing
the “cards on the table”. When approaching these essays with the author’s
poetry, this lecture emphasize a politicity in his texts, specially by the parodic
recapture of the tradition and by the reflexion of its metaphors. In these
gestures, the tropes of the poetry and the essays of Prudente could make
inoperative the intitucionalized nationality and resist to the volatilities of the
State’s cultural policies.