The intelectual and the tourist regionalism and otherness in Brazilianliterary tradition

Abstract

This paper proposes the use of tourism as a new concept to define and study a decisive dilemma in the constitution of brazilian literary tradition: the difficulty involved in the process of literary representation in a society where there is a radical separation between the universe of an literate élite, where writers usually come from, and the world of iliterate and poor people, where frequently their characters come from. Manipulating this concept, one would be able to trespass the spacial paradigm that lies under the very used concept of “regionalism” (derived from nativism) and consider the representation of rural man, who lives far from that élite, and the urban poor man who lives near, as two sides of the same coin. In other words, it would make possible to redefine a literary tradition usually depicted as based on oppositions: rural or urban, social or psychological, material or spiritual life, to mention just a few.