Avant-garde and social criticism in Marco Zero, by Oswald de Andrade

Abstract

The year 1933 marked a change of direction in Oswald de Andrade’s career. Under a new ideological orientation, after joining the Communist Party two years earlier, the writer also took on a new conception of the role of the intellectual in society and began to produce works committed to the country’s problems. During the 1930s, he published three plays in this vein and dedicated himself to the project of the mural novel Marco Zero (begun in 1933), with which he sought to produce a participatory literature critical of the development of capitalism in Brazil. In order to accomplish the novel, without giving up the achievements of Modernism’s artistic techniques and procedures, Oswald relied on the socialist avant-garde (including Russian Futurism), which articulated aesthetic research and revolutionary ideological conceptions and gave a social and political meaning to art, understood as an instrument for the construction of the future. From a critically armed perspective, the novel represents the contradictions of the process of capitalist modernization ongoing in Brazil in the first decades of the 20th century.