A word about

“My class likes/So, it’s a crap.”, a nouveau roman by Paulo Leminski

Abstract

In the early 1980s, there appeared in Curitiba a magazine which would have a short life and would bring, in three of its first editions, an unpublished and incomplete novel by Paulo Leminski. “My class likes/So, it’s a crap.” is not in any of Leminski’s books; it was limited to those three issues of Raposa magazine – a culture magazine that, from its cover, promised to link “humor and rumor”. The counter-cultural climate of Curitiba – and of Brazil – in the 1980s is reflected not only in the magazine’s idealization, but also, in a special way, in the Leminskian narrative, which does a rereading of the previous decade without obliterating the political issues that were at the center of the discussions. In order to align the ethical issues raised by the narrative with the aesthetic accuracy of a poet who was very attentive to the formal revolutions of the 20th century, this analysis approaches Leminski’s text, armed with Theodor Adorno’s considerations (1982; 2003) about the importance of form as a sedimented content – which mediates and incorporates the barbarity of the world – and also with the support of by Jaime Ginzburg’s (2012) and Verlaine Freitas’s readings (2008). In addition, essays by Roberto Schwarz (1978), Carlos Alberto Messeder Pereira (1993), Elio Gaspari (2000; 2014) and Bernardo Kucinski (2001) will help to set the Brazilian historical scenario from the 1960s to the 1980s.