Enquanto não nascer o "AMANHÃ". a estreia de José Guilherme Merquior (1959-1961)

Abstract

This study consists of a historical investigation into the debut of the intellectual José Guilherme Merquior. A phase of his trajectory that, more than once, was criticized by the author himself – in Razão do Poema (1965) and in Crítica (1964-1989) (1990) – as a way of manipulating the memory of his thoughts. Added to this rejection, the political stigmas surrounding his personality contributed to the forgetting of the texts published in the Sunday Supplement of Jornal do Brasil. Through a procedural methodology, we rediscovered and cataloged his publications in this vehicle, especially in his column “Poetry for tomorrow”. Through Han Robert Hauss’s reception theory and dialogue with historiographical references, we analyze his writings. Thus, the dissertation’s structure includes an introduction, an assessment of the state of Merquiorian thought, his historical position within the history of Brazilian literature and the expectations about him, his appearance in the SDJB, his work in the section “Poetry for tomorrow” and the conclusions. In summary, the set of theoretical and philosophical values of José Guilherme Merquior’s criticism was directed towards a conceptual horizon of expectation called poetry for tomorrow or simply tomorrow. Thus, “While tomorrow is not born” is, in addition to a rediscovery of his obscured debut, a descriptive analysis of the circumstance in which Merquior found himself in the dawn of his critical-intellectual work.