Space and image in the city of Pagu's Industrial Park

Abstract

This article analyzes the urban images of Pagu’s Industrial Park, published in 1933. The novel presents the multiplicity of everyday life in the modernizing city of São Paulo, from a rapid and fragmentary aesthetic. This work uses the novel’s urban images as a medium of knowledge of the city’s urban transformation and the historic and literary complexity present in the book, based on studies from the fields of History, Philosophy Sociology and Literature. It identifies the spatial division of the city, the specificities of its territories, the social and political relations that take place in it. It understands that the materiality and dynamics of the city play an important role in the social process decanted in the novel, because they condense this process synthetically in its images. Hence, the intensity of Industrial Park’s urban images, which are linked with its modernist form, can be attested through the excavation of their historic content, in such a way that evidences the heuristic and aesthetic potential of this novel, historically discredited in Brazilian’s literary tradition.