Instrumento linguístico “retórica” na construção do projeto de língua nacional no Brasil

Abstract

After the proclamation of independence in 1822, Brazil ceased to be a Portuguese colony and began to seek the constitution of a nation with its own identity, rehearsing a citizenship that led to the formation of republican government in 1889. For this purpose, institutions, knowledge, politics and language practices was mobilized for the consolidation of a Brazilian nation-state. For this reason, the nineteenth century forms a series of representations and senses built around the national language, metalinguistic discourses generated around the Portuguese language, end up forming a corpus representative of a memory about the language and such discourses are strictly linked to political elements of an epoch. One of the attempts to legitimize the Portuguese bond in independent Brazil was a constitution of knowledge about this language, and to risk some of the linguistic ideas of this period, we will analyze "These for the Contest of Chairs of Rendores, National poetics and Literatures, of the Internship at the College D. Pedro II - 5th Point: Literature, Fourth Epoch, 17th Century ", written by the interim professor of the same chair, José Maria Velho da Silva in 1878, in Rio de Janeiro. This manuscript mobilized knowledge that differentiated the Portuguese language from Castilian, with the intention of defining and structuring the national linguistics. Velho da Silva's goal was to distinguish Brazilian Portuguese from Portuguese from Portugal, as this would be contaminated by Spanish, which influenced him during the Baroque period. That is why the author delegitimizes most of the Portuguese literature of this period. The work was destined to professors with interest in entering the magisterium of the main secondary school of the Brazilian imperial era, the Pedro II College. Thus, the work is intended for the teaching public and legitimizes a practical approach and the necessary knowledge for the teaching of Rhetoric, Poetics and Literature, and the document in question points out more specific directions about literature. The fact that writing is metalanguage in itself, that is, it is able to say about itself, it shows (Pfeiffer, 2001), (Auroux, 2009), allowing us to objectify, in this work, the identification of visionary elements of consolidation of a national language, submerged in linguistic policies, within a nation-state project, initiated since the nineteenth century.