DLB384 Twenty-first Century Brazilian Writers Paulo Lins.pdf (original) (raw)

Contemporary Brazilian literature

Introduction to special issue of Romance Quarterly (2016) on contemporary Brazilian literature. The volume includes essays by Regina Zilberman, Regina Dalcastagnè, Luiz Fernando Valente, Rex Nielsen, Rogério Lima and Cristina Ferreira Pinto-Bailey.

Brazilian Literary Criticism and Historiography

Revista Brasileira de Literatura Comparada

Resumo: Os estudos literários brasileiros, depois de manifestações esparsas no período colonial, representadas pela atividade de academias literárias fundadas no século XVIII, só se expandiram efetivamente ao longo do século XIX. A produção literária nacional cresceu em quantidade e qualidade, assim como os estudos literários, que, por um lado, eram demandados por esta produçãoa qual, afinal de contas, necessitava ser estudada e avaliada-, mas, por outro lado, estimulavam esta criatividade, ao estabelecerem como critério de valor o alinhamento da ficção, poesia e dramaturgia com a agenda nacionalista. Como resultado, de 1820 a 1880, os estudos literários no Brasil passaram por um período de expansão e diversificação. Se nos anos 1800 a educação literária foi conduzida no ensino de segundo grau, de 1930 em diante cursos de literatura em nível universitário começaram a estabelecer-se no Brasil. Neste artigo, faremos uma breve introdução à crítica e à historiografia literária brasileira, desde seus primórdios até o presente.

Brazil 2001: A Revisionary History of Brazilian Literature and Culture

In one of his most intriguing poems, Carlos Drummond de Andrade provides inspiration for this current volume of Portuguese Literary & Cultural Studies - "Brazil 2001: A Revisionary History of Brazilian Literature and Culture". The poem, called “Hino Nacional,” is a paradoxical reconstruction of variegated efforts aimed at the building of the nation. In the final lines of the poem, however, it is “Brazil” - as an impossible Kantian thing-in-itself - that emerges and refuses all attempts to grasp its essence: Brazil does not want us! It is sick and tired of us! Our Brazil is in the afterworld. This is not Brazil. There is no Brazil. By any chance, are there Brazilians?

Speaking for themselves: observations on a “marginal” tradition in Brazilian Literature

Brasiliana, 2016

The article discusses the so-called Marginal Literature in São Paulo’s outskirts – produced by authors who do not “fit” in the symbolic hierarchies’ canon –, within a broad overview of Brazilian literary tradition that has once tried to represent social inequalities and marginalization. Firstly, it will be briefly situated a debate according to which the “dialectic of malandroism”, as proposed by Antonio Candido, has been shifted in a varied panel of artistic forms and practices towards a “dialectic of marginality”, as suggested by João Cezar de Castro Rocha, based on the exposition of social conflict instead of its disguise. Secondly, an analytical architecture of an aesthetics of marginality will be proposed by identifying to what extent past literary experiences have influenced marginal literature movement. Finally, a framework will be provided to understand some strategies authors have been using to reverse prejudices related to their cultural expressions, which implies an attempt to create an alternate form of narrative based on the place of enunciation and the right to speak by themselves.

Foreword to the Brazilian Edition

Crossroads of Freedom

This book is at the crossroads of vari ous paths in recent historiography. 1 Walter Fraga followed the trails of experience and self-reflection blazed by slaves, freed people, and masters, to understand conflicts and alliances in the Bahian Recôncavo (the bay on which Salvador is located, and its immediate agricultural hinterland) from the end of the nineteenth to the early twentieth century. In so doing, he abolished the radical dissociation between "slavery" and "freedom" which had led many scholars to see the end of bondage in 1888 as either the terminus of one historical road (and research agenda) or the beginning of another; for it became clear that strategies, customs, and identities were worked out before emancipation shaped subsequent tensions between subalterns and their superiors. Indeed, the focus on actual lives, lived and pondered, as a way to discover broader social logics, brought Professor Fraga to the path of microhistory, an approach that seeks "God" (evidence of larger pro cesses of change and continuity) in the intricacy of "detail. " 2 This option, in turn, took him to people's names-that is, to the method of nominative rec ord linkage-as a strategy for tracking persons over time in order to trace individual and collective biographies. Crossroads of Freedom: Slaves and Freed People in Bahia, Brazil, 1870-1910 is the point of encounter of these diverse but converging paths. To say this, however, only weakly defines the book's qualities. The crossroads in this case are exceptionally charged with power-so much so that it is difficult to do justice to Fraga's method in a brief compass. How does one explain, for instance, the magic of chapter 2, in which the author employs detailed police documents and an exceptionally rich trial rec ord to reconstruct the assassination, by slaves, of a priest-administrator on a sugar plantation of the Carmelite Order in 1882? Fraga analyzes and contextualizes the case so skillfully that it illuminates slave owners' theater of dominion and