Materialidade das novas mídias incorporadas no modernismo literário: Laranja-da-China de Antônio de Alcântara Machado

Abstract

This article proposes to analyze how the new means of communication and transport at the beginning of the 20th century figure (and shape) the lively and intermedial prose of an important Portuguese-speaking modernist author, Antônio de Alcântara Machado (1901-1935). We are interested in verifying the role of materiality (Süssekind, 1987; Gumbrecht, 1985 and 1997) of these new media as a constitutive element of the articulations of meaning in Machado's prose and above all their effects on the transformation of the mentality, daily life and behavior of the characters of Laranja-da-China (1928), one of his books of short stories that is still not widely explored by critics and which has as its setting the environment of São Paulo in the 1920s, in full and accelerated pace of urban and cultural modernization.