THE ERA OF INQUIRIES: BOOKS, READING AND READERS IN SÃO PAULO ON 1920S

Abstract

This essay investigates the published work of an editor (Monteiro Lobato), a
literary critic (José Maria Bello), an essayist (Antonio de Alcântara Machado) and a pedagogue (Manoel Bergstrom Lourenço Filho) in both journals and the press during the 1920s.
Although a dialogical relation cannot be claimed when one considers the corpus in its totality, some selective affinities among the authors are made evident through a close reading. This common ground turns out to be the search for data gathering, trend projection, and diagnostic tools with regards to editorial practices as well as the making of the readers in the city of Sao Paulo. If one considers both referentiality and argumentative modes deployed by these cultural mediators, it is possible to view the Era of Inquiries as the rise of a discourse that will shape a cultural politics that articulate reflections on books, the editorial field, the readers’ development as well as the city cultural equipment. From a retrospective point of view, the Era of Inquiries might be considered an important set of reflections that inspired the creation of the Culture and Recreation Department program directed by Mário de Andrade in the 1930s.