Civilization and violence in São Paulo's lands notes about on the novel Chão Bruto, by Hernani Donato

Abstract

This paper purports to analyze Hernani Donato’s Chão Bruto in order to show how the narrator elaborates the text by mobilizing categories such as civilization and progress, considered as physical and cultural barriers in rural areas. The book recounts the occupation of western São Paulo State in the beginning of the twentieth century and the violence that came about as a consequence of the struggle for land. In order to accomplish this, the author employs notions such as civilization and progress as implicit categories in the development of the plot. The analysis proposed here focuses on the confrontation between civilization and violence and the concept of structure of feelings, which will help understanding the permanence of bucolic images in narratives about the rural.