Memoirs of a militia sargeant: no one learns samba at school

Abstract

This article suggests the hypothesis of undesrtanding Memoirs of a militia sargeant as a Bildungsroman for the free man in the Rio de Janeiro from 1850s. Therefore, however, it reads the Antonio Candido’s reference essay, “Dialética da malandragem”, to argue that the critic overlaps an ulterior figure, the “malandro”, built in Brazilian culture in the 1920s/1930s, on the “capadocio”, also present in the novel, but not as the main character. If this interpretation as a Bildungsroman is reasonable, what would that “Brazilian” reader was learning? How they differ the bourgeois represented in narratives of the capitalism’s center, mainly England and France, and the free man represented in novels from this capitalism’s periphery?