Brazil- Literature: Year In Review 2004

Brazil- Literature: Year In Review 2004

Brazil In 2000 the most notable literary celebration of the 500th anniversary of the discovery of Brazil was the revival of major works of Brazilian theatre, ranging from plays by 19th-century dramatists to Oswald de Andrade’s revolutionary O rei da vela (1937) to contemporary works. (See World Affairs: Brazil: Sidebar.)

Several important critical studies appeared. Marcelo Ridenti’s Em busca do povo brasileiro: artistas da revolução, do CPC à era da TV dealt with the continuing effects of the highly politicized culture of the 1960s and ’70s. American critic David S. George reconsidered the fate of the Brazilian theatre of the 1980s and ’90s in Flash & Crash Days: Brazilian Theatre in the Postdictatorship Period. Maria Antonieta Pereira’s No fim do texto: a obra de Rubem Fonseca examined Fonseca’s characters within the context of “barbarous humanism.” Luis Alberto Brandão Santos’s Um olho de vidro was a critical evaluation of the literary achievement of the highly regarded novelist Sérgio Sant’Anna. In late 1999 Yudith Rosenbaum published Metamorfoses do mal: uma leitura de Clarice Lispector, in which she studied sadism as an important element in Lispector’s fiction. Donaldo Schüler and Linara Ferreira Pavani organized Gregório de Matos: texto e hipertexto, a collection of essays reconsidering the colonial poet’s works from a sociopolitical perspective. Marisa Lajolo’s Monteiro Lobato sought to distinguish Lobato’s seemingly divergent literary styles—the premodernism of his children’s literature and the traditionalist conservatism of his regionalist stories.

The growth of Internet sites dedicated to Brazilian letters and literary criticism was another highlight of the year. A new electronic publisher based in Paris, www.00h00.com (called Zero Hour), began to publish digital books of Brazilian and Portuguese literature. RBL Editora (http://members.tripod.com/~lfilipe) published all genres of literature as well as literary criticism. The Network of Brazilian Women Writers (Rede de Escritoras Brasileiras) featured younger women authors on its World Wide Web site: http://rebra.org. João Ubaldo Ribeiro, one of Brazil’s most eminent writers, published his new novel, Miséria e grandeza do amor de Benedita, as an electronic book (e-book). This e-book could be read on a personal computer screen or on a portable wireless computer. Discussion groups dedicated to Brazilian literature and sites featuring specific authors were also developed during the year.

Highly esteemed literary scholar and critic Afrânio Coutinho died in August. Coutinho had organized the landmark A literatura no Brasil (3 vol., 1955–59), which introduced the “new criticism” movement into Brazilian letters.

by: Irwin Stern