Paulino de Oliveira: o escriba, o cronista e a cidade

Abstract

Who would be this person, born at Rio Pomba’s riverside in Zona da Mata Mineira, next to Furtado de Campos town, Rio Novo’s district, in the arms of Dona Berlamina and Seu Joaquim? Who would be the child who learnt the first letters with Dona Milota, and who made a pact with a comet of only leaving this world in its tail when the comet returned? This boy made himself a man and discovered himself as a typographer apprentice, who later, on the brownish river bed of the Paraibuna wrote about trams, old houses, and Juiz de Fora’s history and its myriads of characters. This research focused on the book Chronicles: Paulino de Oliveira (2001), aims to check out the origins of the deep intent to unravel Juiz de Fora’s pathways and make them registered history in chronicles. Moreover this paper proposes to (re)discover the chronicler Paulino de Oliveira and (re)visit in his writings the writer and memoirist which (re)signified each part of the city through observation to describe acts and facts of a beating Juiz de Fora at the turning of the 19th to the 20th Century. At that moment of the city the intellectual life was on the rise and by consequence many newspapers with serialized stories appeared registering the first writings of some who would become renowned literates in the Brazilian scenery. The research of Paulino de Oliveira’s production and his place as an author amongst his peers is the same as to research the thin limit of literature and journalism. The theory which is the basis to this research is exploratory, bibliographical and documental, having its pillars on the works of Antônio Olinto, Jornalismo e literatura [Journalism and Literature] (1955), Alceu Amoroso Lima, O jornalismo como gênero literário [Journalism as a Literary Genre] (1969), Antonio Candido, A maioridade da crônica [The Chronicle in its Adulthood] (2014), e Milton Santos, Por uma outra Globalização: do pensamento único à consciência universal [Toward an Other Globalization] (2000). All these works aim to elaborate a relationship between journalism and literature, as well as scribe and writer, supported by archival theory and theories of memory.