2019 Theses Doctoral

Modernist Poetics between France and Brazil: Influence and Cannibalism in the Works of Blaise Cendrars and Oswald de Andrade

Lazur, Sarah Jean

This dissertation examines the collegial and collaborative relationship between the Swiss-French writer Blaise Cendrars and the Brazilian writer Oswald de Andrade in the 1920s as an exemplar of shifting literary influence in the international modernist moment and examines how each writer’s later accounts of the modernist period diminished the other’s influential role, in revisionist histories that shaped later scholarship. In analyzing a broad range of source texts, published poems, fiction and essays as well as personal correspondence and preparatory materials, I identify several areas of likely mutual influence or literary cannibalism that defied contemporaneous expectations for literary production from European cultural capitals or from the global south. I argue that these expectations are reinforced by historical circumstances, including political and economic crises and cultural nationalism, and by tracing the changes in the authors’ accounts, I give a fuller narrative that is lacking in studies approaching either of the authors in a monolingual context.