The cultural wars of the nineteenth century: imagination and legitimacy in the face of different national and collective identities (original) (raw)
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Literary history and cultural supremacy: the case of English literature in Brazil (1872-1940)
Anais do II Congresso Internacional da ABRAPUI (Associação Brasileira dos Professores Universitários de Inglês), 2009, p. 1-14.
Literary history can be understood as a discipline of literary studies which acquired autonomy and consolidated at schools and in the universities with the decay of the studies of Rhetoric and Poetics, in the middle of the nineteenth century. Absorbing and appropriating some theoretical and methodological elements from those disciplines, as well as from modern Philology, in its romantic enterprise of rescuing lost civilizations, it not only did a relevant service to the nation states, giving them the necessary data for the construction of their national identities, but also established the basis for the (re)conceptualization of literature, which came to be understood as the expression of the spirit of the peoples, as well as of their national cultures, and for its constitution as an object of study and teaching. This paper is related to the Research Group “History of the teaching of languages in Brazil” (UFS/CNPq), which intends to investigate the process of institutionalization of the teaching of languages and their respective literatures, as well as of their configuration as a school and academic discipline, trying to delineate its pedagogical, political and cultural purposes in the education system of the country. Its objective is to investigate the way how the institutionalization of English literary history became a privileged instrument in the process of affirmation of the national identity and cultural supremacy of the English people, analyzing the case of some textbooks of English literature produced or published in Brazil from 1872 to 1940.
American, British and Canadian Studies, 2018
Literary and Cultural Circulation is made up of eighteen chapters by different authors who explore this broad issue through different frameworks. Consequently, the meaning of literary circulation varies throughout the volume, according to the purposes of each text and the specificities of each object of analysis. The quality of the essays is undeniable and, despite the differences between them, circulation, considered in its broadest sense, is the main subject explored in the texts that vary, in short, around two main aspects. One of them is the perspective from which circulation is understood. In this respect, the essays can be divided into four main thematic axes that address the role of circulation: 1) in specific authors or for a specific genre, 2) in the postcolonial condition, 3) in our times, that is, in the digital and culture industry age, and 4) in the formation of a national interpretation. Since the starting point determines the point of arrival and the specific results of circulation, the texts also differ from one another in terms of the various implications of circulation taken into account. Thus, various essays discuss the consequences of circulation for literary production, for the expression of subaltern groups, for the acclimatization of European ideas in the Americas, for reading, for culture and for literature, approaching also the theoretical issues that surround this subject as well as the methodological and market implications of this propensity of literature to circulate. Due to the very size of this book, it would not be possible to present the main ideas of all the essays. I will try instead to present the ideas of at least one of the essays from each axis. The contributors are scholars and/or professors from different countries (United States, Brazil and Spain) who, as I noted, have dealt with this academic and cultural debate in different ways in their research. Diversity, a hallmark of literary
Comparative Perspectives on the Rise of the Brazilian Novel
Comparative Perspectives on the Rise of the Brazilian Novel, 2020
Comparative Perspectives on the Rise of the Brazilian Novel presents a framework of comparative literature based on a systemic and empirical approach to the study of the novel and applies that framework to the analysis of key nineteenth-century Brazilian novels. The works under examination were published during the period in which the forms and procedures of the novel were acclimatized as the genre established and consolidated itself in Brazil. The 15 original essays by experienced and early career scholars explore the links between themes, narrative paradigms, and techniques of Brazilian, European and North American novels and the development of the Brazilian novel. The European and North American novels cover a wide range of literary traditions and periods, and are in conversation with the different novelistic trends that characterize the rise of the genre in Brazil. Chapters reflect on both canonical and lesser-known Brazilian works from a comparatist perspective: from the first novel by an Afro-Brazilian woman, Maria Firmina dos Reis’s Ursula (1859) to Machado de Assis’s Dom Casmurro (1900); and from José de Alencar’s Indianist novel, Iracema (1865), to Júlia Lopes de Almeida’s A Falência (The Bankruptcy, 1901).
Luso-Brazilian Review, 2003
Around the time of the quincentennary of the arrival of the Portuguese on the shores of what would become a sumptuous South American country, Brazil engaged in serial stocktaking about the nation, the unfolding of its destiny, and questions of identity with indigenous, African, and Lusitanian substance.' Academic inquiry about the concept of Brazil, the direction of its historical formation, and its multifarious cultural complex have also reached new crossroads in North America, as exemplified by the concept and realization of this volume. In the present appraisal of the functions of the master term culture and of its inseparable mate civilization in the sphere of Portuguese and Luso-Brazilian studies, I will refer primarily to the latter constituent of our hyphenated identifier within the purview of programs in language-literature departments. This contribution to the assessment of the status of our field has been shaped somewhat in the mold of Sander Gilman's public addresses on the humanities in transformation. In this encompassing domain, a most prominent aspect of the last two decades has been the paradigm shift from the study of literature to that of discursive practices, an evolving and anxiety-ridden dialectic of literary criticism and cultural critique. Telling symptoms bf the ever-increasing relevance, some would say urgency, of reconsidering keywords in our area is an issue of Publications of the Modern Language Association that features a presidential address on cultural competence and transcending monolingualism, as well as an installment of the section "The Changing Profession" called "Why Major in Literature-What Do We Tell Our ~tudents?"~ Part of a provisional response may lie in the very meshing of literature with the pair culture & civilization. Concomitant issues pertain to the implications of such an affair for an already significantly diversified scholarship and curricula in modem languages. The word culture is a dauntingly polyvalent term used in many disciplines to signify a full range of human endeavor. Culture, in a word, is everything. In foreign-language humanities, it usually denotes the essay and beaux arts, often verbal folklore and film as well. In a fresh study of globalization, the "conventional social scientific sense" to be applied is summarized "as the beliefs, values, and lifestyles of ordinary people in their everyday existence" (Berger 2), which includes modem mass-media entertainment. The anthropological outlook encompasses tribal, traditional rural, or urban combinations of shared practices, leamed behaviors, symbolic communication, and adaptation within a society (Bodley). "The complexity of the idea of culture is nowhere demonstrated more graphically than in the fact that its most eminent theorist in postwar Britain, Raymond Williams, defines it at various times to mean a standard of perfection, a habit of mind, the arts, general intellectual development, a whole way of life, a signifying system, a structure of
Globalisation and Literary History
Bulletin of Latin American Research, 2006
Last week I was at a meeting of Latin American scholars who were debating a joint project provisionally titled, ' Between Power and Knowledge. Towards a History of Intellectual Elites '. It soon became clear that all of the terms of the title including ' between ' were to be contested. Such radical revisionism also haunts Latin American literary studies as we attempt to rethink national and regional cultures in what is now regarded as a post-national moment, one in which there has been a rejection of linear historical narrative, a questioning of the very term ' Latin American ' as a self-explanatory framework and of literature as an evolving series of well defi ned genres and movements, evaluated according to not always very clear aesthetic criteria and with regard for linguistic virtuosity. The national and continental imaginaries, deployed in Neruda ' s Canto General , in Gabriela Mistral ' s Canto a Chile , in López Velarde ' s Suave Patria , and explored, re-evaluated and condemned in countless novels, are diluted or dissipated as Latin American writers now situate their narratives in Siberia, Germany, Africa, London, Paris or a myriad of other places or abandon the nation ' s capital for its margins and provinces. When I began teaching in the early sixties, it was quite common for people to ask what was ' my ' country, taking it for granted that one specialised in a national culture. José Donoso remarked on the fact that it was uncommon in 1960 to hear laymen speak of the contemporary Spanish American novel: 'there were Uruguayan, or Ecuadorian, Mexican or Venezuelan novels ' (Donoso, 1977: 10). Yet many writers, most prominently Borges, had already repudiated the idea of a purely national tradition. Cortázar (1969) boasted of the mental ubiquity afforded him because of living and writing in Paris, and Donoso (1977: 19) enthusiastically supported the ' disfi guring contamination of foreign languages and literatures '. But this did not mean that they did not situate their writing within the nation, although their view was often oblique. There was an abundance of terms-dependency, underdevelopment, Third World, periphery-to which thinking about the nation was yoked (Escobar, 1995), and there was anxiety over anachronism, over the time warp, over the need to attain parity, or, as Octavio Paz put it (e.g. Paz, 1967), to inhabit a time when Latin Americans would be in synchrony with the rest of the world, a synchrony which the novelists felt themselves to have attained. The boom was a coming of age, an entry into adulthood, and a refusal to be identifi ed with the rural or with anachronistic narratives such as the ' novela de la tierra ' .
Novels adrift: British contributions to the making of the Brazilian novel
Revista Anpoll, 2006
In an interview given in 1977 to a Brazilian periodical, one of Brazil's leading literary critics, resuming a debate brought about by his 1973 essay "Misplaced Ideas", argued that not only do ideas travel but, in the case of Brazilian nineteenth-century literature, they travelled by boat, "coming from Europe every fortnight, on board steamships, in the shape of books, magazines and newspapers". 2 Books, magazines and newspapers which, with the suspension of censorship in 1821, started circulating more freely and constantly in the bookshops, libraries and circulating libraries established in Rio de Janeiro, mainly from the 1820s and 1830s onwards. Among these books -available for purchase or rental -, there were novels and romances. They came mostly from Lisbon and Paris and were in their majority Portuguese or French. Until recently, there was not much evidence as to the existence of English novels among the books sent to Rio de Janeiro. Brazilian literary historians and critics tended to consider this presence and their impact on Brazilian novel writing and novelists small and irrelevant. What a more thorough investigation about those books reveals, however, is that Britain and British novelists were much more prominent and played a much more important role in the making of the Brazilian novel than previously thought. As a matter of fact, a considerable amount of the novels that had Rio de Janeiro as their destination did actually hide their true origin, challenging the claim that French novels and novelists were foremost as models in the making and consolidation of the Brazilian novel.
From Europe to Latin American * Ways of Reframing Literary Circulation
In this paper, written along with José Luís Jobim, we will first present two precursors of World Literature as a transnational project: Hugo Meltzl (1846–1908) and Machado de Assis (1839–1908), authors whose paths never crossed, but who both produced arguments against the grain of the nationalist wave sweeping the West in the nineteenth century. Having done so, we will provide a concise examination of historical ways of looking at the relationship between Europe and America, and finally of ideas of imitation/emulation in the literature and culture of Latin America. Keywords World Literature – literary and cultural circulation – imitation and emulation in Latin America If World Literature is a term that seeks to embrace those works that circulate beyond their cultures of origin, and the questions born of that circulation, then one of the most productive questions we can raise about it is: what do we consider to be the original culture of such works? When we speak of literature in the Americas, we must remember that this is, to a degree, an extension of European culture. Not necessarily more of the same, * Translated by Flora Thomson-DeVeaux