Jorge Amado's political intervention project and his literary production in the 1950s

Abstract

Jorge Amado is an exemplary model for capturing the instigating relationships between the sociology of culture and intellectuality, emphasizing the complex interactions between artists and intellectuals with the socio-historical context of their time. The research investigates the similarities between the social reality of Brazil in the 1950s and the literature of Jorge Amado, tracing relationships between the ideas of modernization, development and revolution in customs with the author's literary body. In order to investigate how Amado's political-intellectual performance is inseparable from the historical transformations experienced by this author, we rely on the conception, fully defended by Williams (1960), that the intellectual is not an isolated island, but the product of a social trajectory, a certain socialization process, a set of social relations. In this sense, methodologically, we chose to carry out a socio-historical analysis of Jorge Amado's political trajectory. This type of analysis allows, as Thompson (1995) defined it, to reconstruct the spatial and temporal conditions in which a set of works materializes and is socially structured. This time, we propose to use Goldmann's genetic structuralism (1976), establishing the possible relationships between specific social and historical conditions and his literary work.  Thus, as an outcome of this research, Jorge Amado's departure from the more orthodox Marxism becomes clear, bringing the abandonment of a more denunciationist character in his works to a dive into social and political transformations that are based on a deep critique of customs.