Rodolfo Téofilo e a migração cearense para a Amazônia na passagem dos séculos XIX e XX

Abstract

The present work tries to analyze the migration from Ceará to the Amazon, in the transition of centuries XIX and XX, through the literary construction realized by Rodolfo Teófilo (1853-1932). For Teófilo, literature served as a space to question the lived, where the esthetic work carried out by the whiter would generate a product capable of educating readers and transforming society. The production of this whiter allows us to reflect how literate groups understood the demands, on the one hand, of an “artistic foundation of nationality” that needed to contemplate disparate cultural experiences (the one brought by the migrant in relation to the one existing in the Amazonian space) of the construction of a civilized image of the European molds, which clashed with the mestizo reality of the population, constituting a dilemma for the men of letters of the period. The construction of the experience of migration in the literary circles of Ceará was marked by conflicting visions, based on a dichotomy of prison/ freedom, since the representations of Ceará‟s space were marked by the character of poverty and lack of resources for daily survival, with the only solution being migration, and, on the other hand, the departure of the native tree, meaning an unnecessary expatriation, since the place of destination, the Amazon, would be worse in terms of solitude and identity disintegration. The methodological work with literature, according to the literary critic Antonio Cândido, must take into account that the literary work is a model of coherence proposed by the author, who arranges the words in order to transform the matter of inspiration into an organized whole. It is, therefore, for the historian to reorder the writer‟s would-readings at the time of writing, to observe the message he intended to share with the readers and the goals he sought to achieve, taking into account the perspectives opened up in his own literary form.