Literary Forms and Genres

Research Projects:

 

From the backstage of creation to the poetics of Osman Lins

Description: A research front on the background of Osman Lins’ literary creation must be deepened and enlarged, since there is a rich and vast material for that. The process of creation, the search for the act of writing and the writer’s commitment with his own time are frequent topics of the Osmanian fiction. There are numerous documents, notebooks and correspondence full of information about the writer’s concerns with these issues at different stages of his life. Gather, organise, analyse, and interpret such documents, linking them to Osman Lins’ fiction should promote the opening of paths to broaden and deepen the understanding of his work as well as to systematise his ideas on such themes and also contextualise it among creators and thinkers of his time, from sources revealed in his notebooks and dialogues from his correspondence.

Professor in charge: Sandra Margarida Nitrini (snitrini@usp.br)

 

Historical forms of the Short Story II

Description: Study of short story as a genre, through the comparison of short stories by some of the most important American novelists of the 19th and 20th centuries. The Early German Romanticism and the problems of genre, crucial moment for the comprehension of ‘short story’ and ‘novel.’

Professor in charge: Regina Lucia Pontieri (relupo@usp.br)

 

Studies on Samuel Beckett

Description: This research project is focussed in the Brazilian reception of Beckettian work (recollection of performances, academic readings, and editorial impact), as well as in investigating the many points of confluence and rupture among the limits of lyric, narrative, and dramatic genres in Beckettian writings. It brings together professors, PhDs, PhD and Master students, engaged into discussing the work of the Irish playwright, prose writer, poet, and essayist, from a point of view that combines different fields of knowledge (language and literature, philosophy, social psychology, performing arts, fine arts).

Professor in charge: Fabio Rigatto de Souza Andrade (fsouza@usp.br)

 

Modernisms, modernity, and revolution: Graciliano Ramos and the crisis of the novel in the 1930s

Description: The study is part of the discussion on the historical and aesthetic coordinates for the emergence of Modernism, as well as its variables in peripheral contexts and ‘differential temporalities’ (Perry Anderson), aiming to reinterpret the literature of Graciliano Ramos in a dual perspective. Namely, in comparison with works and conceptions of the Early Brazilian Modernism and in comparison with the framework of North American literature of the 1930s. Therefore, we seek to discuss the crisis of the post-1929 novel and its attempts of solution, involving issues such as reconfiguration of realism from modernist experimentation; the relations between literature and politics; the experience of the North American novel of the 1930s; the relations between literature and society, with an emphasis on discussion of the place and role of intellectuals in the context of the capitalist crisis (1929) and in particular in the framework of Brazilian modernisation during the 1930s along with the ‘Estado Novo.’ The vanishing point of this research project is the reflection on the topicality of Graciliano Ramos’ work and the questions posed by the literature of the 1930s.

Professor in charge: Ana Paula Sá Souza Pacheco (anapaulapacheco@usp.br)

 

Poetics of modernity

Description: Studies on aspects of lyric poetry production and on poetics in the modern period, including the dialectic between poetry and other literary genres and the continuities and ruptures in relation to classical poetics.

Professor in charge: Fabio Rigatto de Souza Andrade (fsouza@usp.br)

 

Realism and literary genres in Gustave Flaubert - Phase II

Description: From theoretical and analytical suggestions of Auerbach, Lukács, and Bakhtin, the research seeks to analyse the relationships between the realistic figurativeness and the dynamics of literary genres in Gustave Flaubert’s fiction, with emphasis on ‘Sentimental education,’ the ‘Three tales,’ and ‘Bouvard and Pécuchet’. By doing so, we aim to emphasise the modernity of the Flaubertian narrative, both in the compositional level as in what concerns the relationship with the reader, contradicting most common conceptions, structuralist and poststructuralist, about the alleged prereflexive naivety of 19th-century realism.

Professor in charge: Samuel de Vasconcelos Titan Junior (samuel.titan@usp.br)

 

Critical theory and literature

Description: This project aims to analyse and interpret, in the field of literary theory and comparative literature of the 20th century, the contribution of related authors, directly or indirectly, to the so-called ‘Critical Theory’ (Georg Lukács, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Leo Löwenthal, Herbert Marcuse, Eric Auerbach, Peter Szondi, Peter Bürger, Dolf Oehler, Fredric Jameson, among others). In the specific scope of literary criticism, the research aims to investigate the context of origin, the conceptual content and the critical consequences of themes and procedures such as the ‘immanent critique,’ the ‘primacy of the object,’ the ‘dialectical criticism of culture,’ the ‘essay as a critical form that proceeds methodically unmethodically,’ the ‘mediation between form and social process’ and ‘critical theory of literary genres.’

Professor in charge: Jorge M. B. de Almeida (jorgedealmeida@usp.br)