Objective Form and World Literature: Antonio Candido and Roberto Schwarz

Objective Form and World Literature gathers together for the first time, in any language, the crucial andpathbreaking essays that comprise the core of a critical intervention into literary theory. Marxistcriticism has always aimed at the mutual illumination of literary and social form - but this iseasier said than done. Meanwhile, for all its vigor and productivity, the Anglophone and Frenchliterary theory of the last third of the twentieth century led to the cul de sac at which we findourselves today, in which criticism and theory no longer present compelling reasons to find valuein their object. During roughly the same period, Antonio Candido and Roberto Schwarz werequietly opening up a road less traveled, exploring the cognitive surplus to be gained from a closeinterpretive attention to the great and the flawed works of the Brazilian tradition and theEuropean canon. Reading one against the other, they produced insights, deriving from theBrazilian situation, into the predicament of peripheral culture, the movement of world history,and the ideological constitution of the European core.