Machado de Assis: “o crítico dos outros e de si próprio”

Abstract

Despite the extensive work of Machado de Assis, he has few publications devoted to explicit literary criticism. However, many of the Machado’s fictional narratives are offered as possibilities for understanding his theoretical and critical conceptions. The relevance of this research is precisely to investigate and improve the knowledge about the positions of Machado around issues of theory and literary criticism, demonstrating how this interweaving of theoretical and fictional texts may represent an early affinity with some concepts formulated by Roland Barthes in the twentieth century. Through this analysis of Machado’s fictional texts, I aim to emphasize, above all, some of his thoughts about the literary production and the roles occupied by the author, the critic/theoretic and the reader. Furthermore, the visualization of certain theoretical and critical positions of Machado allows a deeper debate about the common attribute of a trendsetter, which was well summarized by Merquior, in, De Anchieta a Euclides: breve história da literatura brasileira: "Machado de Assis had the insight of modern criticism."