Literature and historical experience in Portuguese-speaking countries

The library of Clarice Lispector

Description: The project proposes a general listing, analysis and critique of bibliographical material previously owned by Clarice Lispector and that today is dispersed in two collections: in the Clarice Lispector Archive of the Fundação Casa de Rui Barbosa library and in the Clarice Lispector Collection of the Moreira Salles Institute, both in Rio de Janeiro. The research intends to transcript inscriptions, identify the authors of the inscriptions, elaborate informative notes referring to these authors, and record and analyse the marginalia (notes written by Clarice in the covers and pages). Such data will allow establishing conclusions about the repertoire of the titles gathered there: preference per authors, genres, critics, journal issues, and critical fortune. Thus, it will be possible to outline a history of the writer in her relationship with her books, that is, a critical reintegration of Clarice in her library.

 Professor in charge: Nádia Batella Gotlib (flc@usp.br)

 

The prose of novels in the 19th and 20th centuries

Description: Analysis of mutual determinations between text and context on the production of prose and poetry in Portuguese language literatures analysing the comparative context for travel literatures, historical discourse, chronicles, and essays in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Professor in charge: Salete de Almeida Cara (flc@usp.br)

 

Angola in the new millennium: the challenges of peace

Description: The project aims to analyse some tensions and contradictions that cover the Angolan society today, aiming to deepen the understanding of their processes analysing, at the same time, some of the discourses and representations from the past, especially regarding several armed conflicts that occurred in the country, discerning the lines of the present. Thus, cultural issues, such as urban music and literature, but also issues from the geography, history, and economy of Angola, especially of Luanda with its markets and the challenges faced by the youth of the country today, are the focus of study of this project.

Professor in charge: Tania Celestino de Macêdo (taniamacedo@usp.br)

 

Camilo Castelo Branco and the rise of the novel: a European dialogue

Description: The main objective of this project is to analyse the work of Camilo Castelo Branco in a European perspective: to verify how a writer from a secondary country within the European narrative market created his novel from the tense relationship maintained with European novels, particularly the French, and with an audience accustomed to read these novels. Therefore, starting from some authors who dealt with the rise of the novel issue, a more contemporary bibliography on the subject will be searched, in particular the one that try to reflect about the rise of the genre in non-central countries. Furthermore, we will study the presence of explicit references to European novels and their authors in the production of Camilo Castelo Branco, aiming to draw a map of the dialogue between his production and that of other foreign writers read in Portugal at that period.

Professor in charge: Paulo Fernando da Motta de Oliveira (pmotta@usp.br)

 

Eça de Queirós: a chronological reading of his work

Description: The aim of this project is to conduct a chronological reading of works by Eça de Queirós, contemplating since his first texts published in ‘Gazeta de Portugal’ to his so-called semi-posthumous (published partially in his lifetime) and posthumous texts. The central idea is not to focus on the genres in the reading of the works (novels, short stories, press texts, letters etc.), but rather seeking to chronologically relate these texts to identify recurring aesthetic, political, and social concerns among them. Although we employ the biography of the author to identify the chronological line of the texts, we do not intend to deal with biographical issues, but only with issues that put in the foreground the writer’s ideas regarding literature, art, and social and political reality in which he lived.

Professor in charge: Helder Garmes (helder@usp.br)

 

Discursive boundaries of Portuguese language literatures: interactive networks and the dynamics of cultural blending - part 2

Description: Analysis of how, in the texts selected from authors of the corpus of this research (authors from Angola, Brazil, Cape Verde, Mozambique, and Portugal), homogenisations and/or contradictory coexistences are formed between constituents of discursive fields that are related to the literary text creation, considering external levels of these knowledge perspectives. In these ‘networks’ (information theory) of interactions or discursive borders we will seek to verify how agencies occur to configure unstable fields of multiple borders, whether they are considered community, social, national perspectives and even those of these areas of knowledge. Literary procedures will be analysed as blending processes (contacts between very different cultures) and/or hybridisation (superpositions between related cultures or discursive series).

Professor in charge: Benjamin Abdala Junior (benjamin@usp.br)

 

Literature and War

Description: The project aims to study novels and memoirs of Angola and Mozambique in which war has an important role. The aim is to reflect about in what extent it consists not only the theme, but also the structure, considering the characteristics presented in the texts, especially in the formation of the narrator and in the creation of characters (a type of character established as a warrior, a solar hero - who accomplishes the convergence of bravery with ethics and value -, or the disappointed, crepuscular hero – whose situation is controlled by disenchantment and tiredness).

Professor in charge: Rita de Cássia Natal Chaves (ritachaves@hotmail.com)

 

Literature and History in African countries of Portuguese language

Description: Comparative study between the African literatures of Portuguese language and their superpositions in the field of History.

Professor in charge: Rejane Vecchia da Rocha e Silva (rejane.vecchia@terracom.br)

 

Literature and marginality - phase 2

Description: Investigation of forms of representation of social marginality in the Literatures of Portuguese language.

Professor in charge: Vima Lia Rossi Martin (vima@usp.br)

 

Goan literature and literatures of Portuguese language in the East

Description: We intend to retrieve texts that one day constituted what today we can designate ‘Goan literature in Portuguese language.’ This is a set of novels, short stories, poems, chronicles, plays, among other genres, which were systematically published in the former Portuguese colony of Goa, in India. Since 1961, Goa started to constitute the Indian State and no longer had Portuguese as its official language, which became practically non-existent in the location. However, a large amount of Goan literary texts in Portuguese language continues to populate Goan and Portuguese libraries and archives and need to be organised and studied. In addition to Goa, the project aims to reflect on the wider context of the Portuguese language literature in the East.

Professor in charge: Helder Garmes (helder@usp.br)

 

Literary comparativeness and sociocultural networks (Brazil, Portugal, and Africa)

Description: The project aims to discuss socio-cultural networks established between the Portuguese-speaking countries, from Iberian cultural hybridity. We will emphasise historical, theoretical and critical perspectives that bring subsidies to the literary comparativeness in several situations. We intend to publish books and chapters of books from the studies obtained, as well articles, and participate in events.

Professor in charge: Benjamin Abdala Junior (benjamin@usp.br)

 

The gunpowder years: fiction, history, and memoirs in narratives of Angola and Mozambique

Description: The project aims to study novels and memoirs of Angola and Mozambique in which war has an important role to reflect in what extent it constitutes not only the theme, but also the structure, according to the characteristic with which it is presented in the texts, a type of character and/or narrator who can be typified as a warrior, a solar hero - who accomplishes the convergence of bravery with ethics and value -, or the disappointed, crepuscular hero (whose situation is controlled by disenchantment and tiredness).

Professor in charge: Tania Celestino de Macêdo (taniamacedo@usp.br)

 

Literary relations Brazil/Portugal through the press - part 2

Description: The project aims to critically identify and analyse literary relations between Brazil and Portugal through press texts.

Professor in charge: Elza Assumpção Miné (flc@usp.br)

 

Cultural territories of Portuguese-speaking countries

Description: Evaluation of cultural territories of Portuguese-speaking countries from a literary perspective.

Professor in charge: Antonio Dimas Moraes (andimas@uol.com.br)

 

Transit through ruins: resistance, memory, and subjectivity in Portuguese language literatures

Description: Reading of literary texts in Portuguese produced between the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century, which stage forms of resistance to globalisation, constituting new negotiations of meaning both to the literary text and to its critique, from the insertion of the individual in a process that articulates homogenisation trends of cultural globalisation to those of its private universe. Reconfiguration of categories of space, time, and identity, determining a cartography of memory, responsible for the particularities of the writings then contemplated. To analyse the new negotiations of meaning present in the Portuguese language literatures, as well as the possible relationships between space, time, and subjectivity, considering, on one hand, the insertion of the individual in the inevitable process of globalisation of the contemporary world and, on the other, the specificities of the insertion of literary discourse in a given cultural niche, which requires a recurrence of memory in such a way that the identity cartographies and, especially, the forms of resistance to globalisation, can be (re)configured.

Professor in charge: Mário César Lugarinho (lugarinho@usp.br)

 

Gender identities in African Literatures of Portuguese language II: Gender and Nation

Description: Reading of texts of African Literatures of Portuguese language, especially of Angolan Literature, that when configuring identity paradigms based on gender, configure the paradigm of national identity. Confrontation and resignification of the Angolan space and the one of the colonial genre evidenced by the Portuguese Colonial Literature of the 20th century. Gender identities and African Literatures of Portuguese language. In addition to the dialectic of the coloniser/colonised and the dominator/dominated: the new man, the hegemonic masculinity, and the (re)configuration of the gender order. The new man and the emergence of female speech. The soldier, guerrilla warrior, the bourgeois, and the marginal: settings of masculinity and of national identity. The nation and the post-colonial state and gender identities.

Professor in charge: Mário César Lugarinho (lugarinho@usp.br)