O linguajar multifário: strangers and their languages in Mário de Andrade's fiction

Abstract

In his modernist search for a literary language wich could reflect spoken Brazilian language, Mário de Andrade subtly registered the language of the strangers in the country. The shock between Portuguese and other languages became an admirable stylistical resource, which was used in different ways to present stranger characters: from the use of national stereotypes to the search for a sociolinguistical and psycholinguistical correspondence of the phenomenon of integration, in the case of Italian, to a subtle use of language in a psychoanalytical sense, in the case of German and especially French, when the lapsus pronounced by the immigrants in their mother-tongue enter the narration with their hidden senses, acquiring a proper life and creating lel to the action.