ABSTRACT
In the new translation of ‘National adequation and critical originality in the work of Antonio Candido’ which follows, Schwarz shows how an essay by his teacher Candido offers a masterclass in applying the method to the analysis of a particular 19th Century Brazilian novel. There is therefore a remarkable elective affinity between Schwarz’s literary theory and Trotsky’s idea of Uneven and Combined Development: in both cases, international unevenness leads to socio-cultural combination and the crystallising of national peculiarities which in turn feed back into the evolution of world development as a whole. Thus the ‘problem of the filiation of texts and the fidelity to contexts’, with the contradictions it engenders, opens onto an international space polarized by hegemony, inequality, and alienation, where we encounter the historical and collective difficulties of underdevelopment. In the Brazilian context, relatively lacking in critical reflection on society, the extraliterary payoff of the revelatory potential of forms has a particularly wide field of action.
