By *

Author's Foreword

There is no intention to guarantee, even if the author is tempted to do so, the production of a text that can be classified in the category that Muniz Sodré coined as highbrow literature. On the other hand, he does not intend to write mass literature,[I] because this belongs to prose, and what the reader has in his hands is a book of poems. There is also no intention of producing a literary farce (term used by Machado de Assis).

the author of Posthumous Memories of Brás Cubas defines the literary fanqueiro in the following terms: “The literary fanqueiro is a social individuality and marks one of the aberrations of modern times. This continuous grinding of the spirit, which turns intelligence into a Manchester factory, is repugnant to the nature of intellectuality itself. To make talent a machine, and a machine of heavy work, driven by the financial probabilities of the result, is to lose the dignity of talent, and the modesty of conscience” [ASSIS, 1859-1863-1946, p. 14].

However, the aesthetic procedures of one gender are present in the other: “There is also the bestseller of good technical-literary quality, which does not directly duplicate any other great work or the real-historical” (SODRÉ, 1988, p. 59). Could poetry, which, alongside prose, forms one of the most basic binomials of literary genres, be classified as mass literature? Could there be a hypermodern and neo-marginal market poetics that, within the book industry (and within the cultural industry) would be able to become as popular as bestseller through the exploration of themes from the information-cultural industry and the representation of institutional conflicts?

In a certain way, on a certain scale, wouldn’t the music industry be doing this? If so, would that be grounds for discredit? And what about the prose poem? According to Professor Olga Kempinska (2012, p. 170), it was created by Aloysius Bertrand. In the prose poem, there is no narrative, but rather “the manifestation of a subjectivity” is staged (idem, ibidem, p. 170).

Perhaps this type of discussion has no reason to exist (or perhaps it doesn't have much of a reason): people talk about a crisis in literary genres. In fact, in times of deliteraturization (loss of prestige of literature) and the craze for instant information technologies — so celebrated by modern Pedagogy in university departments and basic education schools in blind obedience to the orders of the World Bank — it is difficult to start any discussion about literature or about what it is or what it is not; for this reason it may not even be worth identifying the genre (in the same way, it may not be worth talking about canon or canons).

I do not intend to write only poetically; however, I have an aversion to the pragmatism of non-literary genres,[ii] that are incapable of generating estrangement, that is: of generating a new look at the object or content, and incapable of generating the singularization of objects and concepts, as such genres reinforce the banal, the immediate. “Automation”, writes V. Chklovski (1978, p. 44), “swallows objects, habits, furniture, women and the fear of war”.

Some say that political motivations, like any other motivation, because they are extrinsic (external) to the literary text (and also to the non-literary text), are a mere pretext or excuse to use aesthetic procedures and narrative techniques (cf. EAGLETON, 2006, p. 5). This was the theory of the Russian formalists, but the opposite also happens: literature ends up being a pretext and also a support or vehicle for political, didactic and social convictions that are recorded in it in order to confront the status quo. The author is driven by an inner impulse of pure anger, of pure resentment.

Does such a positioning make the writing a pamphlet? Perhaps, but why would that be bad? Obviously it is not about promoting “fascism, racism, and all those sad, idiotic and tragic isms” (VERÍSSIMO, 1996, p. 29): on the contrary: it is about offering, within the polyphonic game, new social visions of the world.

Every ideology, divided into several ideologies in the form of ideological crossings or networks of meanings that are reconstituted in the unconscious, “is not only the imaginary representation of reality to serve the exercise of domination in a society founded on class struggle, nor is it only the imaginary inversion of the historical process in which ideas would take the place of real historical agents. Ideology, a specific form of the modern social imaginary, is the necessary way in which social agents represent to themselves the social, economic and political appearance, in such a way that this appearance (which we should not simply take as synonymous with illusion or falsehood), since it is the immediate and abstract mode of manifestation of the historical process, is the concealment or dissimulation of reality. Fundamentally, ideology is a systematic body of representations and norms that “teach” us how to know and act. Ideological systematicity and coherence arise from a very precise determination: ideological discourse is that which seeks to coincide with things, to annul the difference between thinking, saying and being and, therefore, to engender a logic of identification that unifies thought, language and reality in order to, through this logic, obtain the identification of all social subjects with a particular universalized image, that is, the image of the dominant class [CHAUÍ, 1997, p. 3].

Any ideology is a social worldview, however, not every social worldview is ideological; therefore, I did not sell my pen to the devil. The imbeciles who fight in backyard churches against sexual freedom and the sub-people who see pedophilia in everything will obviously say that I have an ideology, but they do not know what they are doing or what they are saying: they only say what they know and, thus, reveal the massive ignorance that perhaps only divine intervention can free the poor people, to whom I must “throw our worst insults, the screams and blasphemies that burn within us” (CARDOSO, 1969, p. 227).

As for the middle-class academics who insist on separating literature from ideology, historiography and politics, I must say that I am not interested in what they think: these tormented souls do not realize that their attitude is already ideological in the sense that it confirms common sense. The fact is that they only know the most vulgar concept of ideology, which since Napoleon has been used to disqualify and crucify those who criticize ideologies. These poor devils, despite their erudition, have not learned that ideology silences, for example, that they are victims of surplus value and exploitation practiced by their superiors, whom these intellectuals serve as bush captains.

They also haven't learned that ideology is silent insofar as it doesn't say it's ideology, because if it revealed itself as such, it would cease to fulfill its function: that of guaranteeing the status quo. That is why it presents itself as “science” or religion. My verses will only be ideological insofar as they confirm the stupid bourgeois values, which in the final analysis are also the values ​​of the stupid conservative middle class and the unfortunate right-wing poor. If they do this, it will not have been through premeditation, but rather through the author’s failure, who, however much he may not want to, is also crossed and questioned by the ideology (the dominant social worldview).

It is so powerful that it already has the air of revolutionary discourse. It is no wonder that today, teenagers and young adults advocate prohibitions, repression and finger-pointing, as if everyone should be politically correct or the world should be made of angels and saints. In an era in which social networks and alienation technologies are tools of surveillance and control on a global scale, the culture of cancellation has been created, so popular with young people who feel they own the truth and worship youth as if it were eternal.

They do not fight for freedom: they fight for prohibitions and coercions while lacking rites of passage. Such young people are the activists of iPhone, tied to yokes. They repress sexuality as much as churchgoing teenagers, many of whom preserve their virginity without stopping masturbating. I can't stand this hypocrisy. When it comes to sexuality, I'm like Macunaíma, the hero of our people, the hero without any character. I want to earn money and love beautiful women, whom I admire on the streets, on the beaches and in many other public places. I want to be like Master Kame, Dragon Ball, and to Master Jiraiya, the Perverted Sage, of Naruto.

One way or another, I want to write literature. “Literature,” declares Terry Eagleton (2006, p. 14), “may mean [...] any kind of writing that, for some reason, is highly valued. As philosophers would say, “literature” and “weeds” are functional rather than ontological terms: they speak of what we do, not of the fixed state of things. They tell us about the role of a text or a thistle in a social context, its relations with and differences from the environment, the way it behaves, the purposes that can be given to it, and the human practices that have accumulated around it. “Literature” is, in this sense, a purely formal, empty definition.

The British theorist warns about the fragility of the concept according to which literature is imaginative writing in the sense of fiction (2006, p. 13), since the line that separates fiction from reality is very tenuous. “The distinction between fact and fiction […]”, declares the author of Literature Theory, “does not seem to us to be very useful” (2006, p. 2). And one example of this is the fact that “even newspaper reports could hardly be considered factual” (idem, ibidem, p. 2).

Take the infamous Brazilian case of Escola Base as clear and emblematic proof of the British claim. It is emblematic for the following set of reasons: it proves that everyday language and communication, permeated as they are by the press, are neither neutral nor objective, so that the referential (informative) function of the language of journalistic texts, as Roman Jakobson speaks of, is not always the one that stands out the most: what stands out the most is the conative (appellative) function of language, which consists of creating two effects: that of convincing and that of changing the behavior of the reading or listening public.

This change took the form of violence and physical and moral stoning of the school, whose name the press threw into the mud with the regularity of the sun: it explored the case that, in the end, revealed itself to be an invention — a fiction that the masses took as truth. Curiously, fiction (whether literary or not) shows what is possible, and not what is real, even if it uses allegories, which for a long time were the target of academics' disgust.

Many left-wing movements, which should defend Social Democracy and the Welfare State and limit themselves to economic issues and other infrastructural matters, reveal a hatred identical to that of the people who pre-judged Escola Base and its owners. I ask: How many male and female teachers have had their lives destroyed and their careers ruined in scandals forged by a common sense that is increasingly psychologizing and averse to reading literature books (fiction prose and poems)?

The patrol of the supposed moral superiority and good customs is there, masked by the fight for the rights of children and adolescents and the defense of the precious flower of their innocence. These are placed on a pedestal like sacred cows, but they are slaughtered one way or another in the name of statistics, results in obscene external evaluations (such as PISA) and gigantic funds, in tacit obedience to the World Bank's playbook.

It is the author's wish that real readers (very different from the ideal reader) do not try to reduce the verses to this or that interpretation, limited as they are to the various ideological crossings that condition the meanings of the text, meanings that can always be different, even if they cannot be just any one, as Eni Orlandi would say.

One of the most important intentions of this book — and I make a point of making them very explicit in this authorial paratext, a powerful conditioning factor for the reader's horizons of expectations, the reading protocol and the production of meanings — is to cry out in defense of sexual freedom in times of puritanism and the criminalization of a natural instinct.

It is worth quoting Jorge de Sena (2006, p. 249): “Morally speaking, I am a married man and father of nine children, who never had a vocation to be a patriarch, and who has always been in favor of the most complete freedom being guaranteed to all forms of love and sexual contact. No freedom will ever be safe, anywhere, as long as a church, a party, or a group of hypersensitive citizens, can have the right to govern someone's private life.”

For Camões’ poetic self, it is better to experience phallic enjoyment than to condemn it. If activist groups condemn it under the pretext of “objectification” of the female body — too bad for them.

It is obvious that experiences can serve as inspiration, but no literary text can be reduced to the author's life, even when “there is [...] cases in which the author's biography is in a pertinent relationship with his work. Only, in order to be usable, it would be necessary for this relationship to be given as one of the features of the work itself” (TODOROV, 2017, p. 160). Otherwise, as Antônio Candido rightly teaches, solipsism would be possible. Above all, my poetics uses the arsenal of themes offered by global civilization (CANDIDO, 2014, p. 27-49), which is a village thanks to cyberspace.

When we speak of a village, we speak of the rest of the world; in the same way, when we speak of the rest of the world, we speak of a village. From the general we go to the particular and vice versa. (Obviously, this does not exclude the mimesis nor verisimilitude, but all literature is poiesis, which is obviously not a faithful mirror of reality, in line with the arguments of Antonio Candido (2014, p. 27-49). Personally, I do not believe it is faithful, but it is still a mirror: the superstructure of society always reflects the infrastructure. The latter, of course, can be modified by the former.)

Speaking of particular and general, I leave here some instructions for critics passionate about the impressionism of Sunday magazines: “If, for example, a theory establishes a literary formula (which, like every formula, is the systematization of general rules extracted from evidence belonging to various fictional texts, that is: to various particular, specific works) according to which gothic stories contain secret passages, creaking doors, ghosts and trapdoors, we have the law of a genre”.

“It is legitimate to observe, within a text”, states Tzvetan Todorov (2017, p. 151), “the relationship that is established between the color of a ghost’s face, the shape of the trapdoor through which it disappears, the singular odor left by this disappearance”. This work of evaluation judges a particular case (a work) to compare the elements with what the theory postulates, so that it is possible to verify what is different and what is known in the text.

In this way, I repeat, we go from the particular to the general (that is: from the specific work to the literary genre to which it belongs) and vice versa. Thus, we examine “a book that takes its value from other books, that is original if it does not resemble the others, that is understood because it is the reflection of the others” (BLANCHOT, 2011, p. 316).

Furthermore, it is worth remembering: “The author who writes especially for an audience does not, in reality, write: it is this audience that writes, and, for this reason, this audience can no longer be a reader; reading is only in appearance, in essence it is null. Hence the insignificance of works made to be read — no one reads them. Hence the danger of writing for others, to awaken the words of others and discover them for themselves: it is that others do not want to hear their own voices, but rather the voice of another, a real, profound voice, which disturbs like the truth” [BLANCHOT, 2011, p. 317].

This, however, does not negate the fact that the public is the one who consecrates the work, especially because it is the public who identifies with it. However, the public is not the only one who legitimizes it. It could be said that the position that I occupy or do not occupy in what Pierre Bourdieu calls the intellectual field (formed by publishers, critics, readers) is null up to the moment that I write this, and I think it will continue to be null even if this book is published. In effect: Highlighting the dependence of the intellectual[iii] in relation to the image and the judgment that the public makes of him, Pierre Bourdieu states that he can reject the character that is attributed to the intellectual, but he cannot ignore it; the truth of the creative project is given by social reception, “because the recognition of this truth is contained in a project that is always a project to be recognized” (1968, p. 114).

However, there are works that tend to create their audience, while there are those that are created by it. For Bordieu, “'successful authors' are [...] the most [ objects...] accessible to traditional methods of Sociology, since it can be assumed that social pressures [...] dominate in their intellectual project” (1968, p. 115). According to the aforementioned French intellectual (1968, p. 105-45), every public meaning of the work is, as an objectively instituted judgment, necessarily collective, and occurs in the relationships between the editor and the critic, the author and the public, the author and other authors.

Thus, the author's relationship with any work is always a relationship mediated by another: the relationship maintained by its public meaning. In the interdependence of the constituent parts of the intellectual field (which, for me, is the same as the literary system, as Antonio Cândido says), some have greater functional weight and act in an unequal manner to give the field its particular structure, as in the case of particular agents (writers) and systems of agents (such as the education system).

In the interactions between these parties, “there is almost always [...] a plurality of social forces, sometimes competing, sometimes coordinated, that [...] are able to impose their cultural norms on an extension of the field [...]” (BOURDIEU, 1968, p. 127). Furthermore, the structure of the intellectual field maintains a relationship of interdependence with the structure of works hierarchized according to their degree of legitimacy. It is known that there are genres that are more “noble” than others.

To speak of genre is to speak of theory (or poetics, to use a term older than theory). Theory is an explanation that brings together the rules of a genre based on the observation of particular works. Genre, as the name suggests, is a generalization, it is the general, which arises from the identification of similarities that specific works maintain among themselves, even due to intertextuality. When particular works are examined separately and it is discovered that, despite the differences, they basically employ the same formula, it is postulated that they belong to a genre.

Therefore, everything that is said about a genre is theory, while everything that is said about a particular work is criticism (criticism is not necessarily badmouthing). From the particular we go to the general (this is the work of theory, of poetics), and from the general we go to the particular (this is the work of criticism). I, for example, am human, so we can, based on an accurate generalization, say that I need to drink water, but the particular way in which I do this may differ from the way other people do it as much as it may resemble it. (By the way: sometimes, out of laziness, which the bourgeoisie only hates when it is not them who express it, I, who live alone, drink water from the bottle so as not to have to wash the glass.)

(Dealing with literary genres is a bit difficult. People are already talking about non-novels. The novel is an originally bourgeois genre, and the values, which are more like devalues, of the bourgeois class are in crisis, and that is why people are already talking about a crisis of genres. However, I still think it is valid to use the notion of literary genre as a point of reference. After all, all human beings use taxonomies, that is, everyone uses classifications. Another difficult thing is criticism itself. Everyone has the right to express opinions about texts recognized as literary. It turns out that, if scientific criticism wants to be as fundamental to society as medicine is to non-doctors, specialized criticism needs to be better disseminated while still being well-founded and more surgical than the impressionistic criticism of newspapers, even though both types of criticism — academic and non-academic — can coexist.)

Why criticize? Because it is necessary to discover what is different in particular works, since, depending on the changes made by the authors, a genre undergoes mutation. Sometimes, a work differs from the genre in which it is classified.

An example is the novel The Castle of Otranto (1764), by Horace Wapole (1717-1797). It still belongs to the romance genre, but it is a gothic novel. It is a founding milestone of the gothic novel: it inaugurated this genre of novel, and this is proven by the fact that it was imitated, as Ariovaldo José Vidal points out in his Introduction to the Brazilian translation of The Castle of Otranto. Discovering what was different about him is the work of criticism.

Another example is the detective novel. Since the 1983th century, every detective story has used the following formula: a crime is identified, but its causes are unknown. A detective, whose personality is formed by very personal characteristics, such as a mania or a hobby (cf. REIMÃO, 79, p. XNUMX), retraces the criminal's steps using reason. In the end, it is discovered that the most unlikely hypothesis is the true one. There is no supernatural element or magic.

However, there is one particular work that employs this formula but adds magic: the romance series. Harry Potter (1997-2007), by J.K. Rowling (1965). Another rule (that is: another theory postulated from evidence, which, by definition, is empirical) is that the detective narrative takes place in the polis, that is: in the city. If we admit that this is true, Blood Swamp (1987), an adventure written by Pedro Bandeira (1942), deviates from this rule, as most of the criminal investigation is carried out in the Pantanal, in Mato Grosso do Sul, a more natural environment.

Literary criticism cannot be done without theory; in the same way, theories cannot be done without criticism or without a set of criticisms around one or more works. Such sets are the critical fortunes, which should never, ever, ever compete with literature or take its place. They merely express different interpretations and, thus, confirm that meaning is in fact the meanings and that they are not univocal. The different critical currents (Structuralism, Marxism, the Frankfurt School or Critical Theory, New Criticism with its distanced and approximate readings, the Aesthetics of Reception and its seven theses, the Theory of Effect), with their methods and methodologies, are literary theories.

Anyone who says that there is no need for theory to analyze a literary text is already stating a theory according to which theory is dispensable (and this, of course, is a paradox). Such currents (to which we can include the currents of Translation Studies, such as the one to which the late Lia Wyler was affiliated) are below a larger discipline, a discipline whose function is to bring together all theories and to criticize literary criticism (metacriticism). Yes, I am referring to Literary Theory.

I hope that, even with the freedom inherent in critical impressionism (which in my opinion is the method of practically every essay, a reflective and subjective genre), critics from Literature departments use Tzvetan Todorov's three projection paths, as well as the methodologies of all academic literary study, which, apparently, no longer preside over the preparation of reviews written by doctors, namely: diachrony, synchrony, deduction, induction, choice of themes, etc.

For François Jost (1994, p. 334-347), both a study of national literature and a comparative study employ similar methods, which I will now state again: diachrony and synchrony, analogies, deduction, induction, choice of themes, motivations and influences between authors. According to the aforementioned scholar (1994, p. 334-347), the term “comparative literature” indicates that literature should be compared, but does not indicate the terms of its comparison, although there are two definitions of the term: one popular and the other academic.

This includes works that use identical aesthetic codes because they have used the same language and their authors share the same cultural background, whereas the former is tautological: Portuguese literature, for example, is the literature of Portugal. It is not about writers from different countries, but simply from different times, and whose concerns and language used are the same. According to Jost, from a technical point of view we are much more in the domain of Weltiliteratur (world literature) than in comparative literature, which presupposes the existence of modern critical concepts.

The author even states that it would be better to use the term global literature (which perhaps fits in with the idea of ​​collective unconscious), since its specific differences lie in its comprehensive nature. Both a study of national literature and a comparative study employ similar methods, which are now repeated for the third time: diachrony and synchrony, analogies, deduction, induction, choice of themes, motivations and influences between authors.

No one should teach a priest how to say mass, but, as Machado de Assis would say, everything needs to be explained. It is through these paths that we will see what makes the text different from others of the same genre and what is similar and innovative about it, even though there is nothing new under the sun, or even if it created a new genre. Psychoanalytic studies are always welcome, as long as they do not reduce the text to this or that school of psychology; this would be the same as ignoring aesthetics.

Proofreaders, who work informally in exchange for crumbs, should follow the precepts of Ecdótica, and by this I do not mean to say that the function of proofreading is that of Ecdótica, because it is obvious that it is not. If there were more investment in Textual Criticism, there would be no need to say this.

If someone decides to publish my verses in another country, the translator will have autonomy, something that, in Brazil, due to the narrow-minded mentality of certain individuals, is still a “heresy”.

As someone raised in the Southeast, I have no intention whatsoever of using regionalisms. My fear is that of creating a gross incompatibility of registers (formal and informal). The most I can do is, “to the exact extent that there is a Brazilian Literature” (FILHO, 1972, p. 285), use “a Brazilian Literary Language” (idem, ibidem, p. 285).

This, of course, is only valid if what is offered to the reader here is actually literature or Literature: if what is offered to them is bad literature, literary nonsense or paraliterature, then the linguistic discussion has no reason to exist, even though the differences between the standard cultured norm (idealized and, in many cases, not achieved by cultured speakers or writers, professionals of the word that they are) and the cultured norm (the latter being real in synchrony, which is the most recent historical state of the language) are discussed.

Obviously, art cannot be bound by scruples or modesty that censor it before the artist even expresses it on paper or on the computer screen; therefore, it makes no sense to avoid slang or vulgar words. The types of register (formal and informal) are like the sacred and the profane: one depends on the other for both to be established.

The prosaic and the poetic are very close to each other: in fact, if I say, for example, that it is freezing cold in Teresópolis, I am using hyperbole; if, however, I say that it is freezing cold, I am also using hyperbole. Which one is more beautiful? In other words: which one is more poetic?

Homonymy and double meaning, of course, are resources that writers can explore as much as alliterations and assonances, like a street poet who, in 2018, on a train, said that he wanted to work in the mouth… he wanted to be a dentist. An expectation is created that is broken at the end of the verses. (Note the word pena in “Mar português”, by Fernando Pessoa.) Critics have an ethical duty to be attentive to these phonic and semantic phenomena.

We fall into the realm of stylistics and, therefore, into the realm of aesthetic procedures, as mentioned by the aforementioned Chklovski. Driven by an inner impulse (to use Antonio Cândido's expression), the poet is not bound by restrictions and experiments with what he has managed to learn from literary schools. What would be concretist or neo-concretist in the poem “Super Mário”? (present in the section Heroic Verses). What is marginal or neo-marginal about the poems “Esbórnia” and “A Virgem deflorada na pedra da caiu (ou da praia, ou do cemetary)”? Does the use of rare rhymes really enhance the sonnets? (in which decasyllabic verses are not always used). What innovation or preservation can the reader notice in the interaction with the sonnets? How do tradition and rupture fit into the intertextual game? What is modern or modern about the poems that do not follow fixed models and denote profound irreverence? Do the verses generate strangeness or do they merely confirm commonplaces? Are commonplaces bad? Everything here is an experiment with procedures — hence the title Experimental poems.

The virgin deflowered on the rock of the waterfall (or the beach, or the cemetery)

For Damares.
Shimmering, trembling as it lies down;
She opens, her hair flying;
And, just as the breeze kisses the water,
Man's tongue and fingers are touching.

Carried away by sweet languor,
And washed by its discharges,
The maiden on the rock was made
Woman moaning from bleeding.

Like a thirsty vampire, I take off the cloth;
The stained fabric removed,
I drink blood under the gaze of the moon,

The mother witness of sweet harm
Inherent in defloration, a rite
That the voyeur you could see it clearly from the street.

*Marcio Alessandro de Oliveira He has a master's degree in Literary Studies from UERJ and is a teacher in the Espírito Santo state network..

Reference

Marcio Alessandro de Oliveira. Experimental poems. Victory, Fine Reading, 2023. [https://amzn.to/4jsuw19]

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WYLER, Leah. Languages, poets and bachelors: a chronicle of translation in Brazil. Rio de Janeiro: Rocco, 2003.

Notes

[I] There is something deeply wrong with the Literature departments. They discuss textual genres (which are unlimited), discursive spheres (which are spheres of human activity), gender identities (so popular with activists) and, of course, they discuss literary canons, although they have NEVER, EVER, instituted the discipline Theory of Mass Literature in Literature courses. What is the point of so much discussion, if we do not even have decent and sufficient public libraries? What is the point of discussing canons, if those who finish Library Science college run the risk of going hungry? What is the use of the horizon, if all we have is the alley?

[ii] What I see in Linguistic Studies is, despite what its most prominent and famous promoters deny, an infamous and obscene support for the emptying of the curriculum. Today, the BNCC, which is a disgrace, is the institutionalization of the deliteraturization of the curriculum. There is no longer the discipline of Literature, a barbarity that is the extreme opposite of what Roland Barthes considered. I don't know if there is reductionism in the postulates of Antônio Marcuschi and Bakhtin, but the fact is that the curriculum clings to a nomenclature of textual genres and makes it an end, not a means. Thus, it confirms the trivialization of prosaic genres. If Plato wanted poets to be expelled from the polis, linguists, many of whom have never taught on the floor of a primary or secondary school classroom, which is why they have neither the empiricism nor the authority to speak about it (and here I refer to the dialectic that exists between experience and theory as Kant conceived it even before Hegel), manage, perhaps unintentionally, to reaffirm the emptying of the curriculum in the name of false inclusion and reinforce deliteraturization. Memes and advertisements for bars are more important to the BNCC and to linguists than the texts of great authors, who were geniuses. Interestingly, I don't remember basic education teachers being consulted for the preparation of the last BNCC, made in 2016 with the opinion of those who think they can say what can and cannot be taught in Portuguese and "Literature" classes in elementary and high school, although many scientists, close as they are to the pedagogical fuss, have never taught in basic education. I also don't remember reading opinions from masters and doctors in Literary Studies: I only remember the opinions of those in Linguistic Studies, and not in Literary Studies. And why should I expect the opposite or anything different? Literature is no longer a subject: it is embedded in Portuguese classes like a piece of clothing shoved haphazardly into a drawer. Obviously they will say, perhaps based on Morin and other pedagogists, that this avoids the fragmentation of knowledge and promotes “interdisciplinarity” or “transdisciplinarity” and certain “competencies”. In short: they will always use pedagogical nonsense that rationalizes, in a gesture inherent to the defense mechanism, the delusions and stupidities of modern pedagogy. Pedagogy and Linguistic Studies, trapped in delusions and nonsense, are unaware of any of this, and woe betide anyone who dares to criticize this state of affairs. Cultural Studies, in turn, try to absorb the Theory of Literature. It is necessary to raise a dissenting voice against this nonsense. I ask: Who is interested in silencing Literature? Answer: This is a State determination, which, in truth, is a market determination. But there is much more: In the eagerness to promote a supposed social inclusion, in a cynical and new-school exercise of pedagogical optimism, they change the preparatory curriculum and all the other curricula (one of them is the hidden curriculum), but they only promote a social inclusion in reverse, which apparently is done in the name of the right to education. In fact, it is all done in the name of public funds, a large part of which goes into the pockets of publishers and school equipment companies, and promotions in public teaching staff, an attitude similar to that of Eichmann, as Hannah Arendt tells us about. Activists who defend “inclusion” and “plurality”, many of whom have never taught in primary or secondary education or simply never taught at any level of education, preach, without any scientific basis, that education is the basis of everything. Now, education is in the superstructure, which Marx speaks of. It is not the basis of society: society is the basis of education. In a country where sewage flows in the open air, it is impossible for social justice and democracy to start at school.

[iii] There are differences between the organic intellectual, as Gramsci speaks of, and the cutting-edge intellectual. The organic intellectual is not necessarily erudite or has an academic title. The priest, the evangelical pastor, the dishonest economist who defends neoliberal attacks on social security and the statutory public service and, more recently, the youtuber They are organic intellectuals. In short: they are opinion makers. As a rule, they are at the service of the ruling classes and have a powerful ally: the press. They always give “technical” opinions to newspapers. Very few organic intellectuals try to unmask ideology. The Literature professor could be an organic intellectual at the service of the truth, but today he no longer has prestige or a chair: neoliberalism takes all that away from him, and if he complains, he will be seen as despotic and antidemocratic. Who does he think he is to attribute meanings to literary texts and air his opinions and progressive theses? (says the academy itself).

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