Araripe Júnior and the Hyperesthesia of the Tropical Serial

Abstract

In this article, through an arch-philological approach, we propose to accentuate the becoming of Araripe Júnior's critical association between hyperesthesia and the effects of reading serials from his first approaches to the reception of naturalism by young writers, at the moment in which periodical publications grow exponentially and a reading public is constituted. We notice, in turn, a recurring association between a serialized literature considered disposable and a reader characterized as social waste. The survey of his unique conception of literary hyperesthesia is productive to draw new approaches to his outstanding theory of tropical style and Brazilian obtundation, projected as a survival in the literary canon and in the serials of his contemporaries. At the same time, we emphasize the prescriptive sense of Araripe Júnior's essays, aimed at young serial writers, to ward off the revulsive potential of naturalistic hyperesthetic literature on the mass public and to redirect its innervating lyricism towards the constitution of a psychology of tumult, which contributes to an aesthetic and cultural renewal. Also around hyperesthesia, the prescriptive intervention of his essays seeks to regulate the influence of a monstrous Zola, in his ability to show and make people feel the reality of precarious modern life. Finally, we notice his approach to literature as a toxin, in which a pharmacological key of modern Latin American literature resonates.