Unveiling transcultural readings of Eliot's and Pound's modernist aesthetics: Modernism, postmodernism and Brazilian concrete poetry

This dissertation proposes a cross-reading of modernism, Brazilian concrete poetry, and North-American postmodernist criticism in order to show the apparently seamless relation between history and aesthetics by using the process and concept of transculturation to underscore their connection, or to throw light upon the seams. Despite the differences in the concretists' and the postmodernists' reception of modernism, both operate a reduction upon modernist texts, which becomes apparent by examining their emphasis on formalism and their rejection of the historical engagement present in modernist texts. On the one hand, postmodernist critics Andreas Huyssen, Linda Hutcheon, and Richard Kearney foreground modernist aesthetics as elitist and ahistoricist, on the other, the concrete poets Haroldo de Campos, Decio Pignatari, and Augusto de Campos embrace modernist aesthetics in its formalism as capable of authorizing their own literary practice.;Considering these recent readings of modernism, it is necessary to recontextualize and redefine modernist aesthetics. While focusing on T. S. Eliot's and Ezra Pound's texts for a definition of aesthetics, this dissertation reinserts modernist aesthetics within other contemporary cultural and historical discourses as in Sigmund Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents, and Henri Bergson's philosophical discourse on time and subjectivism, and by the Brazilian modernists' "Anthropophagous Manifesto.".;In order to reject decontextualization as a critical practice, this study then examines the cultural and social aspects that explain postmodernists' and Brazilian concrete poets' reading of modernism, specifically the counter-discourses rejecting the historicism of postmodernist representations, that is postmarxist criticism, and the developmental and universalizing discourse available in the 50s and 60s in Brazil.;The conclusions of this research present the possibility of historicizing aesthetics, and literary movements for that matter, and of (re)analyzing the alleged rupture between the literary histories of the first and third worlds. The example set by Brazilian concrete poets, and Brazilian modernists as well, shows that the understanding of the cultural specificities of first- and third worlds depends on the comprehension of a larger frame of reference implied in their relations.