A journey outside the box

Cecília Meireles and the modernist project

Abstract

Among the problems he points out in the traditional historiography of art, the French philosopher and art critic Didi-Huberman, in his work Diante da imagem (2013), criticizes what would be the imposition of an ideal model produced from the historiographic discourse, which limits the perception of the artistic object or even excludes it, for not fitting into that model. Such a discourse, “turning to an ideal”, ends up “subjecting the object to that ideal, imagining it, seeing it or preventing it - in short, shaping it and inventing it in advance.” (2013, p. 114-116). It seems to us that this is what happens when we look more closely at the fixed image of Cecília Meireles and her poetry in our literature history compendiums. Our objective, in this article, is, therefore, to discuss the place (or, more accurately, the ‘non-place’) occupied by Cecília Meireles and her lyric in the literary historiography of Brazilian poetry.