Literary Encounters

Research projects:

Rewriting in contemporary Irish literature

Description: Study on the transposition of Greek plays to the drama produced in Ireland in the last decades of the 20th century.

Professor in charge: Munira Hamud Mutran (mhmutran@usp.br)

 

Paths of the English Novel in nineteenth-century Brazil 

Description: Study of the circulation of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British novels that circulated in nineteenth-century Brazil, in order to interrogate the marks they left in terms of narrative paradigms and techniques, and their contribution to the process of formation and consolidation of the genre on Brazilian territory, resulting in the acclimatisation of forms and procedures. It addresses the issue of the importation of literary forms and their local adaptation and transformation. 

Professor in charge: Sandra Guardini Vasconcelos Teixeira (sgtvasco@usp.br)

 

North American Theatre and Comparative Drama

Description: Historiographic and critical study of modern and contemporary North American drama from the point of view of its formal and theoretical characteristics and of the relationship between texts and stage productions.

Professor in charge: Maria Silvia Betti (mariasilviabetti@gmail.com)

 

North American Theatre: drama, theatre companies and performing conceptions (1968-1990)

Description: Analytical and critical study of drama, theatre companies and performance conceptions in the context of the United States in the period comprised between 1968 and 1990. 1968, the year internationally marked by political demonstrations against the capitalist establishment, was particularly important for the rise of countercultural movements and demonstrations against the cultural and theatrical mainstream. The end of the 1980s, on the other hand, demarcates the end of the Reagan era, as well an accelerated commodification of culture, with strong resonance in the area of dramatic  and theatrical practices. This research project aims at examining the role theatre within this specific context. It also seeks to investigate the reception of North American theatre and drama in Brazil.

Professor in charge: Maria Silvia Betti (mariasilvabetti@gmail.com)

 

Theoretical journeys

Description: Study on critical theories in the English language and the modes of its reception in Brazil.

Professor in charge: Maria Elisa Burgos Pereira da Silva Cevasco (maece@usp.br)

 

Displacements, decenterings: novels without borders

Description: Though an important tool in the diverse processes of nation-building and national identity across the globe, since its rise and consolidation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the novel has never recognized any frontiers. Through transmigration and transculturation, it has challenged what constitutes a polity or nation and what is internal or foreign to these boundaries. The most symptomatic evidence of this porousness is certainly the intersections, the mutual appropriations and cross-fertilizations which have always characterized the genre-as hybrid, mixed, mimetic, and cosmopolitan par excellence. The questions that mobilize us are: 1) how a literary form thought to be enmeshed in a specific historical process-that of the rise of the European bourgeoisie and capitalism - could travel and prosper in other environments; 2) how it accommodates the new cultural landscape; 3) how it does and does not translate new realities and different contents across linguistic borders; 4) and in what way the genre changes thanks to the new uses and new situations in this new time and place. The common object that ties together this project is, therefore, to map the contexts and relevance of these displacements and to investigate the synergies between the foundation and consolidation of the novel and its literary system in Brazil and beyond. Using the theme of “displacements” as its springboard, it aims to chart the development of the novel as both a phenomenon that develops out of the specific circumstances of European industrialization, capitalism, and imperialism, but also a genre that resists these metanarratives both in terms of its transnational appeal and readership. 

Professor in charge: Sandra Guardini Vasconcelos Teixeira (sgtvasco@usp.br)

 

Irish Inflections in Henrik Ibsen’s Plays

Description: For the last two decades, Henrik Ibsen’s work has been revisited by Frank Mc Guinness, Brian Friel and Thomas Kilroy, well-known Irish playwrights. Their plays have been rewritten with Irish inflections which point at analogies between the source texts and their recreation.

Professor in charge: Munira Hamud Mutran (mhmutran@usp.br)