Modern Portuguese and the Narration of Brazil

Modern Portuguese: A Project of the Modern Language Association was a package of film strips, prerecorded tapes, an instructor’s manual and a textbook first published by Knopf in 1971. It followed the model established by Modern Spanish that was also a project of the MLA published in 1960. The preface of Modern Portuguese traces its development in three phases: 1964–66 for planning and research, 1966–67 for writing and evaluation of a trial edition, and 1968–69 for preparation of the final edition (vii). The team of writers consisted of four linguists who were coordinated by Fred P. Ellison and Francisco Gomes de Matos.

This short essay proposes that Modern Portuguese is both a language textbook and a narration about Brazil. While the language textbook followed the format of an audiolingual text, its dialogues and readings written by Rachel de Queiroz (1910–2003), developed a story about family and university life that was engaging and educational. The public for that story was, of course, students of Portuguese at universities in the United States who would for the first time have a textbook focused on building speaking skills. The historic moment for the book was Brazil in the early to mid-1960s and the location for the story was Rio de Janeiro. The fictional world that Rachel de Queiroz created could be called the glory days of a youthful, beautiful Brazil with its new capital of Brasília, its new music of bossa nova, and its life on the beach in Copacabana.

The two questions to be answered, then, are how did Rachel de Queiroz create that fictional world? And what did that world portray? All the dialogues had to contain the grammar items introduced in each chapter or unidade and at the same time develop relationships between the characters and their lives in Rio de Janeiro. The introduction credits Rachel de Queiroz for “Her ear for dialogue and her insights into contemporary Brazilian life [that] provide a lively approximation of the spoken language in culturally authentic situations” (3). That we are entering a fictive world is made clear by the words used in the introduction—“characters and their situations,” “prose readings”—and by references to Queiroz’s own writing or crônicas (6).

The dialogues introduce the characters, the Pereira family and their maid, two young women who are university students, and two young men who accompany them. In addition to the photographs of Brazil, there are readings, which feature letters between the characters, information about the characters, and cultural information that begins to appear in chapter 6 (Unidade 6). While the dialogues advance the plot and also introduce cultural information through the Explicação cultural, the prose readings at the end of each unidade contribute to and reinforce the fiction. For example, the first letter in Unidade 6, written by the American university student and main character Patricia, promises to speak of the people in her Brazilian host family in another letter. Then in Unidade 7, 8, 9 (as promised) we meet some of the other characters, although in a third-person rather than first-person narrative. The letter written by Iara Pereira in Unidade 11 describes Patricia and her studies at the university. Even the reading in Unidade 12 about the Portuguese legacy in Brazil is written as part of the story and begins “Nós brasileiros” while the reading in Unidade 14 is called “São Paulo visto por um carioca.” Thus, in a textbook of twenty chapters, with twenty dialogues and fifteen readings, there are only four readings that do not advance the plot or the characters and are dedicated instead to communicating information about carnaval, cities in the interior of the country, the South of Brazil, and the Amazon region.

Now to a short summary of the characters and their story. The students of Modern Portuguese are represented in the book by Patricia Stephens, a twenty year old who is returning to Brazil after having been a high-school exchange student at age sixteen for ten months. She has received a scholarship for one school year at the Catholic University (PUC...