Belém and the Fried Fish Academy: physiognomies in Bruno de Menezes and Dalcídio Jurandir

Keywords This research is part of a project to investigate the biography and journalistic/literary production of the Fried Fish Academy, a group of intellectuals who gathered around the ideals of literary modernization and valuing the periphery in order to reflect on social issues in the Amazon region of Pará state starting in 1920. This project is intended to examine the relations between this group and the physiognomy of Belém, the capital of the state, by observing the spaces where they gathered and by analyzing the literary works of two members: Bruno de Menezes and Dalcídio Jurandir. The bibliographical research is based on Walter Benjamin’s theory about the city, which was resumed by Bolle (2000) and Gagnebin (2014), as well as research on this group by scholars such as Coelho (2003), Figueiredo (2001), Larêdo (2012), and Nunes and Costa (2016). The analyzed writings are productions in which the city is a place where these writers are observers who redesign its physiognomy through the confluence of everyday images and the social imagination. In this way, the writings of Menezes and Jurandir’s have poetic strength, involving images in motion interspersed with sensory experiences which represent significant fragments of Belém as well as the Amazon.