The Written Childhood in Graciliano Ramos and Murilo Mendes

Abstract

Since the nineteenth century, the Brazilian writers of literary texts devoted to record the events of their life in autobiographies. This practice has intensified in the first half of the twentieth century, when many modernist authors wrote their memoirs. Among these writers stand out Graciliano Ramos (1892-1953) and Murilo Mendes (1901-1975), whose reported the events of their early life in Infância (1945) and A Idade do Serrote (1969), respectively, emphasizing their relationship with parents, the experiences of literacy and learning to read, and also their training as readers. This paper therefore aims at comparing these two works, seeing how these authors made use of recurring elements in classic autobiography, as well as checking the image of childhood that these autobiographers developed with a view from studies by Silvia Molloy (2003) and Jürgen Straub (2009) on the reconstruction of past autobiographical texts.