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Estados Unidos
Tieta leaves town after winning a war against the multinational Companhia Brasileira de Titânio S.A., Brastânio, a plot point with historical references to Arembepe, a town polluted by Titânio do Brasil (Tibrás). By inverting the protagonist's gender, Amado's innovative rewriting of the parable recreates the interactions of two competing forces in Brazilian society and the Catholic Church: the conservative sector aligned with governmental ideas of order and progress and progressive liberation theology. Many artists and critics have predominantly focused on the story line or plot of the Melodramatic Serial.3 However, this approach to the novel overlooks the centrality of theology in Amado's Tieta do Agreste. [...]although some theologians, including Claudio de Oliveira Ribeiro, Wanderson Salvador Francisco, and Antonio Manzatto, have analyzed the presence of Catholic theology in Amado's novels from an anthropological perspective, the presence of liberation thinking in Amado's work-particularly in Tieta do Agreste-has been largely overlooked. Two critics whose work is grounded in anthropological theology and who appreciate the religious elements in the book are Oliveira Ribeiro and Andrade Campos, who argue that the sacred can be rediscovered in the book through the body and its symbolic dimensions.4 According to Ribeiro and Campos, Tieta's seminarian lover is a consecrated body that pursues the religious ideal of the sublime whereas Tieta's body represents the strength of corporal desires untouched by religious precepts, as pointed out by the authors: "Ele expressa a força do material e do corporal, destronando e renovando o mundo de concepçöes e estruturas formado pelo cristianismo" (Oliveira Ribeiro and Andrade Campos 265). [...]when the consecrated body meets the material body with all its force and desires, the seminarian becomes a plural body capable of finding the forgiving Christian God in all his plenitude: "A grande preocupaçâo de Ricardo ao deitar-se com sua tia foi a violaçâo da lei de Deus, a quebra do trato e o rompimento dos votos que ele havia feito e, ao atravessar a zona fronteiriça, seu corpo se desprendeu das prisoes e passou a experimentar tanto o serviço a Deus, como sua humanidade" (266).
