Prose in Brazil

Research Projects:

Literary representations of the prostitute in the Brazilian Modernism

Description: Recurrent in the imaginary of Brazilian literary, the figure of the prostitute is covered of significant relevance in the first decades of the 20th century, as shown in several works related to Modernism. Whether in texts of the period immediately preceding the movement, whether in those produced in the heat of the moment, the presence of prostitution in the arts of the period induces us to think about it as a key piece of the very formation of the modernist sensibility of the country, in parallel to what happens with a good portion of the European vanguards.

Professor in charge: Eliane Robert Moraes (elianermoraes@usp.br)

 

Portuguese heritage and colonial relations in Machado de Assis

Description: The project aims to evaluate a set of poems and prose texts by Machado de Assis with references to themes and forms of Portuguese literary tradition, to understand the circumstances of production, circulation, and reception of these texts in the light of the emotional and literary relations of Machado de Assis with Portugal and the Portuguese culture. By hypothesis formulated from previous studies on Machado de Assis’s work and its critical reception, these relationships are narrower and more constant than the main biographies and areas of criticism about Machado de Assis of the 20th century makes us believe, concerned to emphasise whether the Brazilian quality of the writer and his work or his universal character. In particular, I will proceed to the analysis of the correspondence of Machado with his brother-in-law Miguel de Novais and of celebratory poems of the 1880s, combined with the analysis of Memorial de Aires, seeking a better understanding of the historical matter represented in the work with an emphasis on issues with Portugal and its consolidation in the writer’s last novel. Thus, it is a study that combines text analysis and interpretation, biographical and historical research, aiming at better understanding how the writer related with and represented the Portuguese heritage and colonial relations, as well as how these colonial and postcolonial relationships affected the reception of the work in Portugal and in Brazil.

Professor in charge: Hélio de Seixas Guimarães (helioguim@gmail.com)

 

The critical reception of the work of Machado de Assis

Description: The project aims to perform a history of the critical reception of the work of Machado de Assis from the analysis of some moments of this reception, inserted in a temporal arc that goes from critics of his time to more recent readings. From the systematisation of the critical reception, and the historical understanding of this reception, the project seeks to offer subsidies for a better understanding of the literary work of Machado de Assis and a better understanding of Brazilian cultural processes, considering the central place that the writer and his work occupy in intellectual life since the last quarter of the 19th century.

Professor in charge: Hélio de Seixas Guimarães (helioguim@gmail.com)

 

Struggle, violence, and death in The Devil to Pay in the Backlands: from the Bildungsroman to the epic narrative

Description: The current project aims to deal with themes of struggle, violence, and death in João Guimarães Rosa’s novel The Devil to Pay in the Backlands. These issues will also force me to face the issue of genres in the book, in particular the generic structural determinations of Bildungsroman and the epic genre. As the project will focus on the second part of the novel, the greater result of its accomplishment will be the second volume of my book O Brasil de Rosa: o amor e o poder, in which I studied the first part.

Professor in charge: Luiz Dagobert de Aguirra Roncari (ldaroma@usp.br)

 

Realism and introspection on the modern Brazilian novel

Description: Analysis of the relationship between form and social matter in the modern Brazilian novel. There is a debate around the two trends of the Brazilian novel from the 1930s: the Northeast novel and the novel of introversion stakes the discussion about the boundaries between realistic representation and derealisation adherence modes through which you can discuss literary-historical issues that point to the dichotomies: realism and anti-mimesis, engagement and experimentation, historicity and aestheticism.

Professor in charge: Simone Rossinetti Rufinoni (siruf@hotmail.com)

 

Romanesque form and Brazilian society in the novels from the 1940s to the 1960s: patriarchy and madness

Description: The research aims to investigate the relationships between the remnants of the structure of the patriarchal society and the modes and forms of madness. The anthropomorphised, decadent, and oppressive home, guardian of the patriarchal sociality, stronghold of the memory of the tradition and the enemy of modernisation imposes itself as an image relevant to the understanding of the relationship between literature and society. In particular, the research focuses on novels of the 1940s and the 1950s, namely: Fogo morto, by José Lins do Rego (1943), A menina morta, by Cornélio Penna (1954), and Crônica da casa assassinada, by Lúcio Cardoso (1959). Developments in this area: the public and the private sphere, individuality and patriarchy, the forms of madness and the peculiarities of Brazilian introversion prose regarding social context.

Professor in charge: Simone Rossinetti Rufinoni (siruf@hotmail.com)

 

Idleness in Brazilian Romanticism

Description: Research on artistic procedures and aesthetic categories involving the representation of idleness in the Brazilian Romanticism.

Professor in charge: Cilaine Alves Cunha (cilaine@usp.br)

 

Literature and resistance

Description: Historical-cultural research to detect in fictional, poetic, and essayistic texts the tension between dominant ideology and counter ideologies.

Professor in charge: Alfredo Bosi (abosi@usp.br)

 

Group of Literature and Cultural Studies

Professor in charge: Alfredo Bosi (abosi@usp.br)

 

The narrator in contemporary Brazilian literature

Description: To elaborate, in a historical perspective, a conceptual review of the theories of the narrator, considering the diversity of critical trends, in particular regarding its diffusion in Brazilian studies. To study Brazilian contemporary literary works, with emphasis on the analysis of narrators, seeking to analyse the relationship between modes of narration and contextual issues, to articulate individual cases and general remarks. To characterise literary productions considered as examples of hybrid genres such as letters, testimonies, depositions, chronicles. To evaluate the importance of the rupture with traditional genres in contemporary culture. To discuss the problem of the narrator, considering recent theoretical contributions, from categories of Humanities, taking into account issues regarding ethics, human rights, and exclusion.

Professor in charge: Jaime Ginzburg (ginzburg@usp.br)

 

Fiction and literary criticism in contemporary Brazil: articulations

Description: The research focuses on two simultaneous phenomena in opposition: the growth, expansion, and segmentation of the forms of contemporary literature and culture, with the arrival of new agents to the literary scene; and the restriction of methods, language, and object, in a logic that we could call of expert, from both devoted creators and literary critics. The hypothesis is that this is a process that comprises the two sectors (critique and creation) and that has as its point of contact the university institution, and more specifically the programs of Languages and Literature that graduate critics and writers in paradigms which cherish for literary specificity.

Professor in charge: Jefferson Agostini Mello (jefferson@usp.br)

 

Paulo Emílio Salles Gomes: critical and literary prose

Professor in charge: José Antônio Pasta Junior (josepasta@usp.br)

 

Rite and romance: Lispector

Professor in charge: José Antônio Pasta Junior (josepasta@usp.br)

 

Reading the short stories of Machado de Assis

Professor in charge: Alcides Celso Oliveira Villaça (acvillaca@uol.com.br)

 

The critical reflection of Carlos Drummond de Andrade

Professor in charge: Augusto Massi (amassi@usp.br)

 

Brazilian fiction: from the revolution of 1930 to the present day

Professor in charge: Augusto Massi (amassi@usp.br)