Fissures of modernity: the city as a reference to sin

Abstract

This article makes a diagnosis of the framing of Rio de Janeiro’s city in Nelson Rodrigues’ writing as a reference to sin, revealing all the modernity fissures in republican Brazil. In this context, the values of the Carioca family are in the process of being reformulated in the face of changes in the golden years as opposed to the belle époque. From this process, conflicts and problematizations emerge in the spaces of the city and Nelson Rodrigues absorbed, that is, what was expected of the inhabitants of the pulsating city and what was actually practiced in sociability environments. It is still perceptible, in this universe, a climate of intense reconfiguration of modern urban culture, which causes clashes in the private sphere and extrapolates to the public sphere. Finally, it remains evident that the cracks in the modernity project are a symptom of the writer’s nonconformity in the present and his intimate reading of the city as an atonement for human sin.