Georgetown University faculty member and PhD candidate Patricia A. Soler will present her papers "Pieces of Babel: Brazilian Primitivist Modernism and the Resignification of Paris" and “The Virgin Forest: Transatlantic Aesthetic Interplay in Brazilian Modernismo” at this year’s Modern Language Association Convention.

In her papers Soler discusses works by Brazilian Modernist writer, poet, illustrator, and painter Vicente de Rego Monteiro produced during the second decade of the twentieth century. Soler traces the progression of Rego Monteiro’s national aesthetic from his earlier art nouveau illustrations in Légendes, croyances et talismans des Indiens de l'Amazone (1923) to its ironic counterpart, Quelques Visages de Paris. The Brazilian Modernists’ affirmation of an ahistorical indigenous past simultaneously expunged the participation of other groups, namely Luso-African elements, in the construction of a modern national identity she argues. Rego Monteiro, first piecing together a tenuous national identity based on an ahistorical past, later destroys it in recognition of the limitations of a primitivist modernist position.

Soler also explores the origins and evolution of “primitivism,” emphasizing its employment in Brazilian Modernist aesthetics. Specifically, how the art nouveau and Art Deco styles were adopted and adapted by Brazilian artists by means of primitivist aesthetics in order to convey a seemingly authentic modernity. She proposes a rethinking of the theory and application of “primitivism” in Latin America and instead uses the term “primitive modernism” in order to recognize the interplay between primitivist and modernist tendencies in the region.