BRAZILIAN LITERATURE: CONTEMPORARY URBAN FICTION

David William Foster

Arizona State University

 

NARRATIVE DESCRIPTION

Intellectual Rational

Brazil is the home of one of the great literary traditions of the world. Indeed, Brazil publishes more literature annually than the other major Latin American countries put together. While it is true that a respectable amount of Brazilian literature has been translated into English, few Brazilian authors are accorded scholarly attention outside the reduced circle of the academic critics of Brazilian literature and culture. Machado de Assis is unquestionably well known to those who have an interest in the history of the Latin American novel on the cusp of the twentieth century, as he is considered the finest novelist—often compared with Balzac—to have emerged up until that time in Latin America. Clarice Lispector, after Machado, the most translated author from Brazil (the University of Texas Press has kept her works in print for approximately fifty years), is crucial to any examination of literary feminism in Latin America, and the French feminist theorist, Hélène Cixous has done much to promote her reputation as the one author who most adheres to Cixous’s conception of an écriture feminine.

But beyond these two authors, so much of Brazilian literature escapes the attention of scholars and professional critics for whom Latin America means texts written in Spanish and names like Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel García Márquez or Carlos Fuentes, with few incursions into the writing on the other side of the Spanish/Portuguese linguistic divide. Yet there is much that is unique about Brazilian writing that should make it of compelling interest for Latin American scholars. There is, first of all, the overarching question of race and ethnic identity, of which Machado himself is one subtle and ambiguous interpreter. There is a long tradition of complex issues regarding immigration (especially, Jewish, Italian, and Japanese), as Brazil joins other Latin American societies in being constructed on the basis of not always easily assimilated “foreign” groups. Brazil has also had, particularly in the twentieth century, a rich history of feminist and gender issues, as Lispector so eloquently represents. Also of considerable interest, in the context of the return to constitutional democracy in 1985, are the indigenous populations, and Brazil’s rich anthropological traditions (Brazil was, after all, where Claude Lévi-Strauss undertook his first anthropological research) have heavily influenced poetry and narrative (as have also, in a seamless web, questions of race/ethnicity and questions of immigration). Literary modalities such as critical realism, social realism, dirty realism, and magical realism (a term of considerable debate), have all been explored in complex ways by Brazilian writers. Yet, in the context of the overwhelming weight of Spanish (and one could mention here how, in terms of speakers of the language, the United States is the fifth largest Spanish-speaking country in the world), few find the systematic opportunity to enter into the formidable world of literature written in Brazilian Portuguese.

Content of the Project

            Building on the applicant’s prior experience directing NEH seminars, Brazilian Literature will run four weeks for fifteen participants, between June 22 and July 17, 2009 in São Paulo, Brazil and will provide an introduction to urban narrative in the twentieth century. There are many perspectives one could use to introduce Brazilian literature. The choice of an urban focus is grounded in a major shift in cultural perspectives that took place in Latin America in the latter half of the twentieth century. Brazilian culture, along with Latin American culture as a whole, has become, since the early part of the twentieth century, more and more urban in its focus. The internationalization of Latin America and the enormous internal displacement of its population from the countryside to the city have resulted in recent decades in a cultural production that is predominantly urban. While an urban-centered writing dates from the earliest days of the conquest and while there continues to be a fiction that is focused on a rural setting, the simple fact is that late modern culture in Latin America and an urban focus have become virtually two sides of the same coin. There is, therefore, the need not only to attend to the enormous current importance of the cultural interpretations of the society of Latin America's metropolitan centers (e.g., Mexico City, Buenos Aires, São Paulo, Caracas, Bogotá), but also the rereading of earlier literature that is now part of a firmly established urban tradition. Since one of the fundamental dimensions of culture is a principled interpretation of lived human experience, the analysis of major works of urban fiction must be of interest to any student of Latin American society concerned with understanding how urban life has become so central to the national history of a country like Brazil. LiteratureCthe specific cultural production of concern to this seminarCis a crucial source of social, historical, and political knowledge, which explains why works of fiction routinely figure in scholarly sources of Latin American social scientists. Concomitantly, the processes of urbanization that are fictionalized in Brazilian narratives represent developments in Latin America's largest national society and the one, at the current moment, that enjoys the greatest social stability and most dynamic economic growth.       In accord with the spirit of the NEH Summer Seminars, the five novels chosen are major and canonical texts of Brazilian literature, and the seminar involves the in-depth examination of these texts in the company of a recognized academic expert. The seminar will begin with an examination of Joaquim Maria Ma­chado de Assis, the late nineteenth-/early twentieth-century writer considered the founder of contempo­rary Brazilian fiction. Machado founded the Brazilian Academy of Letters and was one of the first Brazilian authors to "write the city"; we will study his great masterpiece, Dom Casmurro (1899). Machado's texts are complex examinations of the emergence of an urban middle class in what was then the country's capital, Rio de Janeiro. Machado is considered the founder of the modern Brazilian novel. The other four writers to be considered exemplify major features of Brazilian literature as it emerges in the twentieth century under the aegis of Machado's national and international fame. Patricia Galvão signals the importance of recording the experiences of the urban industrial proletariat, and Parque industrial (Industrial Park; 1933) foreshadows the extensive interest in contemporary Brazilian writing on the so-called lower depths of Brazil's sprawling megalopolises. Clarice Lispector, perhaps the most widely read contemporary Brazilian author in translation, was mainly concerned in her writing with modern urban women's lives. In this she follows the lead of Patrícia Galvão, but Galvão never went on after Parque industrial to construct the sort of nuanced narrative universe Lispector achieved, as exemplified in her short stories in Laços de família (Family Ties; 1960). Urban bourgeois gentility is also at issue in Dalton Trevisan's fiction, set in the reputed garden city of Curitiba. Although also ethnically diverse, Curitiba has achieved a middle-class stability that is the envy of other urban areas of Brazil. Yet a writer like Trevisan is fascinated by aspects of urban life hidden away by the glossy images of official Curitiba. Trevisan charts, in a word, a return of the urban repressed. In this he is fundamental to an urban writing concerned with what the project of social modernity elides or suppresses from view, as we will see in the discussion of his collection of interrelated short stories, O vampire de Curitiba (The Vampire of Curitiba and Other Stories; 1965). Finally, Moacyr Scliar's fiction, with its insistence on telling the story of Jewish immigrants in his native Porto Alegre (a story that parallels that of other writers from São Paulo, which is Brazil's major Jewish center), also is significant to Brazilian literary history in responding critically to the often touted notion of the Brazilian "melting pot"; we will study his O centauro no jardim (The Centaur in the Garden; 1980). In sum, these five works are nodes in a network of twentieth-century Brazilian fiction, and in one way or another they relate to most of the major literary activity in Brazil in that century.[1]

Because these are all significant urban novels, they are linked by the com­mon urban concern for contemporary lives. Questions of ethnic and class iden­tity also run through these five works of fiction, and taken as a whole, they provide a mosaic of some of the major social issues in urban Brazil that have been treated, with notable distinction, by the literary record. The works extend from 1899 to 1980, and highlight major moments in Brazilian fiction. Of course, there are many important works of urban fiction during the past twenty-five years, but the point here is to consider those works that are now a solid part of the canon—and those readily available in English translation. Occasion, however will be found to provide a survey of the most important recent fiction to stimulate participants reading after the seminar is over.

The urban focus lends itself because of a major difference between Brazil and the rest of Latin America (and it must be borne in mind that Latin America as a whole has become relentlessly urban: close to 75% of Latin Americans now live in cities of more than a million inhabitants). Unlike other Latin American societiesCtypically Mexico, Ar­gentina, Colombia, or VenezuelaCBrazil is no longer a country in which the major cultural production is concentrated in a metropolitan capital: indeed, the national capital Brasília, established in 1960, has yet to develop a uniquely characteristic culture. What this means is that there has emerged a significant diversity of urban culture in a range of distinctive urban centers. Each of these urban centers has its own history. To be sure, there are issues that relate to all urban centers of the world and Latin America, such as crime, poverty, and the marginalization of social classes. Yet these cities also reveal much that is singular about Brazil in terms of its imperial history and its contemporary reflexes, class issues that are the consequence of an institution of slavery at least five times greater than that of the United States, cultural conflicts relating to immigrant populations, and even geocultural issues that have to do with the terrain and the layout of the cities: while much of Spanish-language narrative was slow to confront the growing importance of the urban experience (the 1960s is where one looks for such writing to emerge in Mexico City and Buenos Aires, for example), at least as early as Machado de Assis, whose works date from the final decades of the nineteenth century, Brazilian literature includes masterpieces that have an urban emphasis.

            The seminar is organized in terms of urban narrative. Such a focus responds to the simple fact that, as has already been noted, contemporary culture in Latin America comes from, refers to, and is essentially circulated through urban contexts. Brazil, in addition to being an urban society like most of Latin America (i.e., the literate population of Latin American societies is, from one end of the region to the other, concen­trated in metropol­itan settings, and has been so since the first decades of the Spanish and Portuguese conquest), is characterized by being a country of multiple, competing, and sig­nificantly differ­ent urban settings: São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Porto Alegre, Belo Horizonte, Salvador da Bahia, Curitiba, and now the new capital of Brasí­lia. Urban writing is often quite distinctive from one city to another, as the urban experience is often distinctive, within, still, the parameters of a con­temporary urban existence that can lead to productive generalizations. Brazil is a society of immigrant populations, which are mainly concentrated in the urban areas: the descendants of the African slave population (this was a forced immigration whose legacy deeply marked Brazil), Italians (São Paulo, like Buenos Aires, has a major Italian pres­ence), Germans, Japanese and other Asians (it has often been remarked that there are more people in Brazil who speak Japa­nese than all of the surviving indigenous languages combined), Poles (Curitiba is the largest Polish city in the world outside Warsaw and Chicago), Jews (prominent in all of the urban centers mentioned as a consequence of the sort of diasporic emigration that brought them to the United States), and even Americans (the legendary Americana colony of post-Civil War south­ern exiles). This array of populations of foreign extraction and their interac­tion with the diverse urban settings of Brazil are factors that contribute to the diversity of Brazilian cultural production and constitute thematic constants of the country's narrative.

Design

            Discussion of one major text will be devoted to each of the three cities of São Paulo, Curitiba, and Porto Alegre; discussion of two texts will be devoted to Rio de Janeiro in recognition of its traditional role as the center of Brazilian national culture. The semi­nar will meet Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday. Sessions will be equally divid­ed between 1) the introduction to history and the city as a center of cultural production, including back­ground information on the writer chosen to represent that city, and 2) the examination in detail of the work chosen for reading and commentary. Each session will last three hours, 9AM-Noon. Afternoons will be devoted to research and to optional language instruction. The Direc­tor will meet with each participant individually on Wednesdays. The language of the seminar session will be English.            The works to be examined, and the urban areas to which they will be tied, are as fol­lows:

Rio de Janeiro: Joachim Maria Machado de Assis, Dom Casmurro (1899). In addition to the simple, crucial fact that Machado is the founding voice of modern Brazilian narrative fiction, Dom Casmurro is considered by many critics to be his masterpiece, a nov­el of con­summate subtle irony in which the consciousness of an upper-middle class male is dissected in terms of the social and cultural pretensions it embodies. In addition to how Macha­do's ironic narrative is central to the development of a distinguished narrative tradi­tion in Brazil, the novel, which focuses on the male protagonist's jealous doubts as to the fidelity of his wife, is now also important for issues of feminism and gender identity. An important linguistic note: written before the conscious efforts of early twentieth-century aesthetics to underscore the differences between Peninsular and Brazilian Portuguese, and between the latter and Latin American Spanish, Dom Casmurro is remarkably accessible to any reader with a solid grasp of literary Spanish. As the Brazilian mulatto who founded the Brazilian Academy of Letters, Machado in his writingCalthough sometimes rather oblique­lyCalso allows for ethnic perspectives, in the sense that it is intriguing to consider how the son of a mulatto house painter not only came to enter Rio de Janeiro's white middle class, but how he came to be its greatest fictional commentator.

São Paulo. Patrícia Galvão's Parque industrial (1933; published under the pseudonym of Mara Lobo) is one of the most interesting Brazilian urban novels, and it has only recently begun to figure in the Brazilian literary canon. It is the only novel written by a Brazilian woman to gain recognition for its commitment to a social realist interpretation of the grow­ing industrialization of the city and its conflicts with traditional pre-modern life. Indeed, São Paulo's enormous growth is a consequence of its industrialization, such that little of its pre-modern past remains. Galvão participated extensively in the artistic movements of the 1920s in São Paulo and was one of the most prominent female voices of her day. Galvão was also a controversial social activist, and she became the first female political prisoner in Brazilian history. Turning her back on her comfortable middle-class family, she joined the Communist Party and went to work in the textile factories. Her novel, which is in large part autobiographi­cal, describes the difficult lives of factory workers, especially women, for whom there were no workplace protections at the time. Whereas Machado's novel still describes the seigniorial city and the emerging bourgeois elite, Galvão's novel is anchored in the working class of the early twentieth century. It is important to note that Parque industrial does not yet enjoy an uncontested place in the Brazilian literary canon, consequently providing us with the oppor­tunity to discuss canon formation in Brazil, the role of women writers in Brazil, and differences between American and Brazilian feminist criticism.

Curitiba: Dalton Trevisan, O vampiro de Curitiba (1965). Curitiba often bills itself, in addition to being the environmentally friendly "ecological capital" of Latin America, as the "Brazil that functions." The self-image of the city is as an ethnic and racial melting pot, where diverse societal ele­ments blend together in creating an industrious, progressive, and sophisticated middle-class Garden City. This is, to be sure, the official image of Curitiba. Social reality is quite some­thing else again, begin­ning with the fact that Curitiba's economic prosperity has pro­voked an intense in-migration of the impoverished and marginal, hoping to make a go of it in ways perhaps no longer possible in São Paulo or Rio de Janeiro. Concomitantly, there has been a considerable cultural production in Curitiba that analyzes the official version of the city and that ironically underscores what that version elides from the "real" social his­tory of Curitiba. Trevisan's nocturnal Vampire is a denizen of the unacknowledged under­world of the city, of the brothels and other dens of iniquity, of a significant bohemian life that contrasts with bourgeois values, and of unassimilated provin­cials and immigrants who belie the facade of genteel decorum.

Porto Alegre: Moacyr Scliar, Centauro no jardim (1980). Scliar is an excellent exam­ple of an "immigrant-conscious" writing in Brazil. Like Lispector, Scliar comes out of a Jewish background (he was born in Brazil; Lispector, however, was born in the Ukraine), but Jewish ethnic and cultural issues are foregrounded in Scliar's writing, in opposition to Lispec­tor's, where they can, perhaps, be seen as a deep substratum. His novel is a pica­resque and yet also magical realist account of a Russian immigrant family that settles in Brazil. Moving between urban and rural settings, the novel underscores how Porto Alegre's Jewish community is fundamentally urban, and the novel's dimensions of existentialist allegory are part of the urban analysis of the nationalistic and macho Gaúcho society of Southern Brazil.

Rio de Janeiro (reprise). We will conclude the seminar by returning to Rio with an examination of the short sto­ries of Clarice Lispector, Laços de família (Family Ties; 1960), one of the first internationally important works of Brazilian fiction after Machado's novels. Yet Lispector's Rio is very different from Machado's. Lispector remains Brazil's most prominent female writer, and one who is often cited in international feminist studies. She is, moreover, the Brazilian writer (after Jorge Amado) most translated into English and other languages, and the most translated Latin Ameri­can woman writer (as already noted, the University of Texas Press has kept translations of her work in print for almost a half century). The work chosen showcases versions of the family from a woman's point of view and the attempts of women to survive in a primarily male-oriented society. The narrative frame of the novel is bitingly ironic in demonstrating wom­en's attitudes toward male dominance and the strategies men use to marginalize and silence women. Lispector is placed strategically as what one can call the “golden clasp” of the seminar because experience has shown that she is the one contemporary Brazilian writer who most excites foreign readers, and it is important to conclude the program with the most favorable reaction possible towards Brazilian literature and culture.

Since the seminar is designed for individuals who are already faculty members, it is important to contribute to their professional agenda. Wednesday (except for the first week) will be devoted to meeting with seminar participants and to the discussion of their professional projects, whether this involves revising already written material, undertaking a new research project, or developing curricular material. To supplement scholarly activities with cultural events, the formal part of the pro­gram will be complemented by organized cultural events on the weekends, in order to take advantage of the enormous wealth of cultural activities offered by a major metropolitan area such as São Paulo. The seminar director has been conducting research on urban culture in São Paulo for the past ten years and has particular competence in genres such as film, theater, and photography. Part of the cultural activities will be to engage in various dérivages in the city: walking tours that will enable the participants to have an actual sense of the city and its physical layout.

Finally, the seminar will include a language component in the form of a Portu­guese language center that will allow participants to develop their written and spoken Portu­guese. This component will be optional, and will be available three afternoons a week. Participation in the center, to be based in a nearby language training school, will involve preparing in advance short written essays in Portuguese on topics of discussion in the formal sessions, and the individuals who have recourse to the center will have the opportu­nity to review their essays with partic­ipating staff and to do rewrites toward im­proving their skills. An arrangement will also be made for conversation groups in Portu­guese: these groups will deal both with the readings of the seminar (including the films viewed) and informal topics concerning Brazilian society and culture. Evaluations of the 2006 seminar held at Arizona State University were enthusiastic about the opportunity to develop Portuguese language skills.

Project Faculty and Staff

The seminar will be directed by David William Foster, former Chair of the Depart­ment of Languages and Literatures and Regents' Professor of Spanish and Gender and Women's Studies at Arizona State University. His research inter­ests focus on urban culture in Latin Ameri­ca, and he has held Ful­bright teaching appointments in Argentina on three occasions and also in Brazil and Uruguay. Foster is currently working on a mono­graph on São Paulo and urban cultural production, a project that he intends to extend to include the city of Curitiba. In addition to conducting NEH Summer Seminars in 1984 and 1986 for secondary-school teachers, Foster conducted a version of this program at Arizona State University in 2006, and in 2007 he conducted an NEH seminar on Jewish Buenos Aires in Buenos Aires. He has had extensive experience in leading cultural tours to Latin America for students and other academic groups.

A Brazilian specialist in the teaching of Portuguese to foreign students will be in charge of the Portuguese language writing center. The writing center will provide those participants interested in improving their written skills with the opportunity for individualized instruction. Some may wish to maintain a diary or prepare essays of personal expression. Others may wish to undertake the writing of journalistic and/or academic Portuguese. The instructor will review manuscripts, offer grammatical corrections and suggestions for stylistic improvement, and review successive drafts. The center will also provide those interested with the opportunity to converse as well with a native speaker. Finally, for those who choose to read the texts in Portuguese, the instructor will be available as a resource in the event that they wish to discuss the subtleties of literary Brazilian Portuguese.

The fifteen participants will be selected by a committee of consisting of David William Foster; Isis Costa McElroy, Assistant Professor of Portuguese at Arizona State; and Melissa A. Fitch, Associate Professor of Spanish and Portuguese, University of Arizona.

The opportunity of the seminar will be announced through appropriate list serv­ers and by a mailing to the Spanish American literature members of the Modern Lan­guage Association and the American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portu­guese, as well as other appropriate venues.

The seminar will be open to fifteen participants who are college or university fac­ulty members in the area of Latin American Studies, which includes, but is not limited exclusively to, fields such as Anthropology, Art History, History, Language, Literature, Musicology, Political Science, Religious Studies, and Sociology. Selection criteria will include applicant's commitment to an inclusive concept of Latin American studies, demonstrated interest in the area of cultural studies, previous study of the Portuguese language and Brazilian literature, or the intention to include such study in a program of professional growth. Although designed to appeal primarily to faculty in litera­ry and cultural studies, outstanding participants from other appropriate academic disci­plines will be given full consideration.

Institutional Context

The seminar will be held in São Paulo, Brazil, the largest city on the Southern American continent. São Paulo is rapidly displacing Rio de Janeiro as the cultural center of Brazil, particularly in publishing, and São Paulo is the financial center of Latin America. While it is true that the city is, to put it bluntly, a metropolitan monster, it is nevertheless quite possible for individuals to find their own niche in the city, especially as regards the intense academic, intellectual, and artistic life of the city. There are many lovely residential areas in São Paulo, and a vibrant public life belies the oft-repeated clichés of urban violence. The seminar will be held in a hotel in the Jardins area of central São Paulo, one of the most attractive areas of the city. Along with the Avenida Paulista strip, the Jardins area hosts some of the most significant cultural venues of the city, and participants will find that most of their personal and academic needs can be met within the confines of this area in which a high level of security is maintained. Just off the Avenida Paulista is the Museu da Língua Portuguesa (Portuguese Language Museum), the only museum in the world devoted to language and literature as its exhibit base. The Museu is located in a former central train station, and the facilities are phenomenal, with an array of permanent and changing exhibits. As of this writing, the last major exhibit was devoted to Clarice Lispector’s contributions to the Portuguese language.

The actual sessions of the seminar will be held in the conference room of the hotel where the participants will be lodged. Such an arrangement is preferable to making use of space on the campus of the Universidade de São Paulo because of bureaucratic problems involved in securing access to intensely used classroom space, but principally because the campus is inconveniently located outside the central metropolitan area. Logistically speaking, it is simply a better utilization of participants’ time to hold the seminar at the hotel, rather than to ask them to spend an hour travel time each way to the university by public transport. Nevertheless, arrangements will be made to conduct several meetings on the campus of the Universidade de São Paulo with representative academic specialists in Brazilian literature (most Brazilian academics have a working knowledge of English, so language will not be a problem). Thus, we will have the opportunity to visit one of the largest university campuses in Latin America, see the academic facilities, including the library, and have lunch at the faculty dining facility located in the forested heart of the campus.

 Dissemination and Evaluation

The seminar director will meet weekly, on Wednesday, with each of the semi­nar partici­pants to discuss individual research projects; this will also be an oppor­tuni­ty to discuss the participation of each individual in the three weekly group meet­ings. At the end of the seminar, the director, along with two members of the selection commit­tee, will evaluate the final re­search projects of each participant and prepare a written evaluation. Participants will evaluate the semi­nar in writing at three points: after two weeks, after four weeks, and after six months.

Submission will be encouraged of research work resulting from the seminar that meets the standards for re­search publication to Chasqui; revista de literatura latinoamericana or other similar publica­tions. One of the mentoring goals of the seminar will be to work individually with participants on their professional research. This might involve revising already written work, such as a dissertation, seminar papers, or drafts of new work; for others it may mean assisting them in beginning to put together a research project. For those who already have a back­ground in Bra­zilian studies and/or Latin American literature, this will mean working with them on their already established research inter­ests. In the case of participants who come from other areas of Latin American studies such as anthro­pology, history, sociology, art history, and the like, it will mean exploring a dimension of Brazilian culture that could be incorporated into their work. In every case, the urban emphasis of the seminar will predominate. Participants in the 2006 seminar have reported on on-going projects, such as the translation of the novels of Roberto Drummond; completion of an essay on Patrícia Galvão; revision of course syllabi to enhance the presence of Brazilian literature in a truly Latin American literature focus; institutional efforts toward making Portuguese a permanent part of a Latin American Studies program; and an essay on the São Paulo novelist, Marcelino Freire, scheduled for publication in a volume on Latin American urban cultural production. As a courtesy to those participants who choose to submit completed research after the close of the seminar, a professional evaluation will be provided of their essays.

Finally, we will create an e-mail listserve and a web site to encourage subse­quent com­munication among members of the seminar and to provide a forum for a wider-audience discus­sion of Brazilian pedagogical and research approaches to urban cultural issues (it may be possible to attach this function to the regular website of BRASA, the Brazilian American Studies Associa­tion). The listserves from the 2006 and 2007 seminars have proved to be valuable channels of communication between the Director and former participants, who are sent periodically information regarding their research interests, and for the communication between participants and their shared cultural and research interests. Participants will be provided information through these two forums toward participation in appropriate scholarly meetings such as BRASA, the American Associa­tion of Teachers of Spanish and Por­tuguese, the Modern Language Association, the Latin American Studies Associa­tion, and various regional affiliates (e.g., in the geographical region of Arizona, the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association). Moreover, a web site will be created prior to the semi­nar that will contain essential cultural information about Brazil. Prior to the inauguration of the seminar, participants will be sent a packet of essential critical and theoretical readings regarding urban cultural production in Brazil. Although this material will not be extensive (in view of the time restraints involved in completing an academic year and organizing a trip to Arizona), it will provide the participants with some common ground as we begin the weekly discussion.

Because participants will not have access to appropriate research collections in Brazil, an essential library of critical material on Brazilian literature , the authors to be examined, and urban cultural issues will be transported from the United States to constitute a reference library for the participants.

Weekly Schedule

Week I: Tuesday/Wednesday: an introduction to the seminar. Wednesday/Thursday: Rio de Janeiro as the traditional capital of Brazil; Machado de Assis will be analyzed as witness to the develop­ment of a modern Brazilian society and modern Brazilian fiction.

Week II: Monday: an introduction to São Paulo as the financial center of Brazil. On Monday/Tuesday: Patrícia Galvão's Parque industrial and the role of women as industrial workers. Thursday will be devoted to Dalton Trevisan as a voice raised against bourgeois decency. Wednesday will also inaugurate a discussion of Jewish culture in Brazil and the importance of immigrant communities and ruptures with the nationalistic theme of a "melting pot" Brazil and the hypotheses regarding a unified social identity.

Week III. Monday: continue examination of the works of Trevisan. Tuesday/Thursday: Moacyr Scliar and postmodernist narrative strategies for marking difference in a Latin American sociopolitical context. The image of a modern, progressive Curitiba and the concept of countercultural writing will provide the principal focus.

Week IV. Monday/Tuesday: return to Rio de Janeiro to discuss the depiction of urban women in Clarice Lispector's Laços de família. Thurs­day: summary of the issues raised by the seminar, including a discussion of projects undertaken by the partici­pants. Friday will include an assessment of the seminar, and there will be a concluding social banquet Friday evening.

We will travel once a week to meet with faculty at the Universidade de São Paulo to discuss specific topics such as the international profile of Brazilian literature, minority writing, and feminist authors.


[1]Two major urban areas of Brazil are missing in this account. One is Belo Horizonte, the center of the early mining industry west of Rio de Janeiro and today one of Brazil’s major urban centers. Unfortunately, the major novelist from Belo Horizonte, Roberto Drummond, has yet to be translated into English. Salvador de Bahia, Brazil’s colonial capital, is also not included. Jorge Amado, the major Brazilian novelist associated with this area and one of Brazil’s most internationally read writers, is mostly known for potboilers with highly stereotyped characters in terms of race and sexuality. He sparks little enthusiasm among serious literary and academic critics, who are apt to see him as selling a particular image of his region suitable for the tourist industry and certain unexamined nationalistic fantasies.