In this article, we will address the interest of literary critic Leyla Perrone-Mois & eacute;s in rhetoric, in its multiple dimensions. Firstly, identifying the way she refers to this field of knowledge in her books, especially in her works dedicated to Raul Pomp & eacute;ia and Lautr & eacute;amont, namely, O ateneu, ret & oacute;rica e paix & atilde;o (1988) and Lautr & eacute;amont Austral (2014). Secondly, showing how she herself makes use of notions inherited from rhetoric-inventio, dispositio, and elocutio-even if not explicitly named, to analyze the work of one of her most important subjects, the French literary critic Roland Barthes. Finally, based on a specific corpus (her texts on Barthes), we try to understand what Leyla's own rhetoric would be: her themes, her textual organization, and her figures, and what effects they provoke in the reader of her articles.
Contemporary Brazilian poetry has proven itself to be conducive to exploring dialogues between different forms of artistic expression, especially regarding the intersection of the verbal and the visual. This article, therefore, investigates the inter-medial relationships between poetry and photography in the book Cinel & acirc;ndia (2021), by Rio de Janeiro-based poet and visual artist Leila Danziger. To this end, grounded in intermediality studies (Rajewsky, 2005; 2020), this analysis aims to discuss how the dialogue between text and image contributes to the construction of meanings about urban space in Danziger's poetry. Based on the critical analyses and the proposed theoretical discussion, we conclude that, in Cinel & acirc;ndia, photography plays an essential role, not only as a visual record but also as a critical element, tensioning the processes of memory, monumentality, and the city's everyday life. Furthermore, interactions between media broaden perceptions of urban space, highlighting the complex relationships between history, culture, and everyday life. The proposed reflections indicate that Danziger uses photography to de-automatize the way we view urban space by recording the interaction between individuals and the city. In this way, Cinel & acirc;ndia has constructed a poetics that frequently dissolves boundaries between media, resulting in an innovative and aesthetic approach that highlights the interplay between poetry and image.
This paper proposes a reflection on the poem as a palimpsestic body in tatiana nascimento's book palavra preta (2021). The book begins with a three-verse poem and takes shape with poems invading and surpassing the limits of the pages, suggesting multiple ways of reading the word-image that destabilizes traditional notions of composing poetry. Thus, we propose the palimpsest-body as a key to reading palavra preta, a body that emerges in the affectionate and safe territory of cuirlombism, and that evokes the presence of a polyphonic lyrical voice. The materialization of this territory and the presence of a poetic "we" is observed in the reading of two poems, making us pay attention to the stylistic erasures of new writings in motion.
This text proposes a reflection based on Variations on saudade by the Portuguese author Patricia Lino, a work in progress begun in 2021, considering within it the manifestation of postures of dismantling, erasing and deconstructing lyrical objects through the exercise of varying them and their subsequent repositioning in renewed configurations, in what is calibrated as a game of tension and fracture of form. Thus, the reading of this work is pursued following this intimate articulation between cutting, transfer and rewriting or repositioning and, in a broader aftermath, silence and homage, radical manifestations of a tense relationship with poetic discourse.
Corte e costura, by Marina Gaspar, is structured through the logic of the fragment. Each poem operates as a "cut" - a gesture that interrupts linearity and reveals an isolated, autonomous memory, almost like scattered scraps. At the same time, these fragments establish a "sewing": an effort to mend experiences, stitch together memories, and produce meaning from what endures. The book thus constructs a poetics of discontinuity, in which remembering and narrating entail negotiating what can or cannot enter the fabric of expression. Throughout the work, sewing and writing become parallel gestures: both involve tearing, mending, reconstructing, and inscribing new possibilities of existence. The instability of the poems - their fragmentation, ruptures, and silences - reflects the instability of the analytical categories within contemporary feminism itself. In this sense, the work suggests that, like fabric, memory and knowledge are also composed of gaps, repairs, and overlaps. What interests me in this study, therefore, is the poetic construction of Marina Gaspar's work: how cutting, threads, and knots - gestures of sewing - emerge as discursive procedures for the reworking of memory and the construction of the archive; how these procedures may be read within a broader context, considering the relationships they establish across different temporalities; and finally, to what extent the approximation between sewing and text can be understood as productive for the construction of a feminist epistemology.
I propose a topological approach to Paul Celan's poetry, exploring the boundary-places he persistently constructs within it. This reflection originates from the poet's own words in his discourse The Meridian, where he states that "the poem asserts itself on the margins of itself" and that the search for the place of poetry would be a "topological investigation" (Celan, 1960). Celan's tireless quest for orientation results in an intriguing spatialization in his poems: whether in syllabic ruptures, abrupt verse breaks, the interior of poetic words, the tense junctions of composites that generate linguistic opacity, the unusual effects of directional and negation particles, or the transitional places evoked in the verses-points that will be examined in this study. Celan's topological approach begins with an analysis of an excerpt from The Meridian, a discourse characterized by critical reflections on contemporary poetry and by philosophical problematizations, particularly of a Heideggerian nature (Lyon, 2006). In this sense, the topological reading of Celan's work is conceived not as a system of signs or as a repertoire of commonplaces-whose tradition goes back to the discussion of topoi developed by Curtius-that would aim at a distancing from reality, but as a mapping of spaces established in language itself, in which singular modes of presence and interlocution are configured. It is concluded that the topos of Celan's poetry constitutes an open-ended boundary, created by a subject inscribed within it, in infinite dialogue with memory and with the "you," as in a Mobius strip.
This paper proposes a critical reading of the dialogues between the poetics of Ana Cristina Cesar and Sylvia Plath, articulated around three axes: the pseudo-confessional, metapoetry, and reading memory. Through an analysis of the poems "A birthday present" and "Words", by Sylvia Plath, and "O tempo fecha" and "sete chaves", by Ana Cristina Cesar, the research investigates how both poets construct lyrical voices that strain the boundaries between lived experience and poetic making. Dialoguing with Rosenthal (1959) and Gilbert and Gubar (1979), I draw on the concept of the pseudo-confessional, marked by the ambiguous transparency of an "I" that performs a fabricated intimacy, in which the female body is configured as a body-territory (Grosz, 2000), subject to control yet constituting an act of resistance. In the field of metapoetry, the notion of opacity becomes central: the poem emerges as a self-reflective and protest space, where the body-through textual resources-transforms into a body-text (Fran & ccedil;oso, 2008). The concept of reading memory (Kleiman, 1989; Halbwachs, 2006) enables an understanding of the affective and critical dialogue between the writers, especially in the poetics of Ana Cristina Cesar, a reader of Plath. Thus, this study highlights how both poets reject and subvert the patriarchal literary tradition and establish, in contemporary poetry, performative and critical discourses that ironize and, above all, challenge normativity.
Jessica Faleiro's Afterlife: Ghost Stories from Goa offers a compelling exploration of haunting histories and cultural dynamics within the Lusophone world. Through a close examination of the ghost stories portrayed in her book, this article explores how Faleiro navigates themes of historical reparation and reparative justice within the context of Goa's colonial past and postcolonial present. I intend to show how Faleiro employs Gothic narrative techniques to illuminate the ongoing effects of colonialism, explore themes of historical trauma and cultural identity, and contribute to the broader decolonial discourse in Indian postcolonial literature. Drawing on interdisciplinary perspectives, this article situates Faleiro's work within the broader framework of Lusophone literary and cultural production, shedding light on the unseen forces that shape the heritage of the Portuguese-speaking world.
An analysis of two monumental works of the Brazilian historiography: Os sertoes, by Euclides da Cunha, and Grande sertao: veredas, by Guimaraes Rosa. The article explores the remnants of the writing of Os sertoes-or what was lost between notes on marginal texts and an excess of theoretical references-to arrive at the marginalia produced by Guimaraes Rosa during his reading of Euclides' greatest work and the travel notes collected by the Minas Gerais author for the writing of Grande sertao: veredas, in order to outline a reflection on the limits of thought and language in modernity.
Studies, in different fields of knowledge, about territories whose histories have been crossed by colonial processes often suffer from a centralizing premise: the conception of influence or the use of a certain notion of tradition that comes from the colonizing element. In the Portuguese-speaking world, this centrality is attributed to Portugal, where the cultural base and mediation between its colonized territories would have come from. This article, however, proposes a South-South analysis between Angola and Brazil without the intermediation of the northern country. Recognizing the imaginary surrounding some images and the Western poetic tradition, it proposes going beyond the simplistic notion of influence, putting into dialogue productions from three distinct temporalities in the literary history of these countries, the 17th, 19th and 21st centuries, using the concept of “cultural memory”, by Jan Assmann. Although the temporal trajectory begins in the colonial period of both spaces, the poetic circularity is read on the axis of the South Atlantic, between poems by Antônio Dias Macedo (Angola) and Gregório de Matos (Brazil). In the 19th century, the moment of Brazilian independence and intensification of Portuguese colonization in Angola, the focus is on the production of José da Silva Maia Ferreira, author of what is considered the first Angolan book, published after his return from Brazil to Angola and contact with poets such as João D’Aboim and Gonçalves Dias. Finally, in the 21st century, it proposes a comparison between poems by Angolan Ondjaki and Brazilian Ana Martins Marques, a dialogue that, regardless of effective contact between the poets, focuses on a shared ethos via “cultural memory”.
Australia is a small, remote and relatively powerless province of the anglophone world. Given that a literary system can only come into existence if literary works can find readers, and given that book publishing and distribution are economic activities, literature in Australia has always operated in the shadow of London (its former imperial capital and economic centre) and, more recently, New York. The article examines the effects of this editorial dependence on the publishing of Australian books and on the existence of Australian translations, in comparison with the situation of Brazil and Argentina.
This work is an attempt at a historical re-reading of an important debate raised by Silviano Santiago in the 1970s about the ideas of model and copy. It focuses on the problems of technical development and the role of the writer within its productive conditions. The study is based on considerations by Karl Marx and Walter Benjamin on the role of technical development in the structure of social relations. The text analyses the possible creation of the myth of the mirror as a paradigm of the supposed superiority of the colonizer in relation to the indigenous, symbolizing the dialectic of civilization/barbarism. To this end, the essay “Latin American discourse. The Space In-Between” (1971) and its search for alternatives to the dialectic between the “original model” of the colonizer and the “copy” of the Latin American writer are taken up as the focus of the discussion; the main proposal of this study is that the myth of the mirror is the archaic point of the problem and that it is from the mirror brought by the colonizer that the reflection of the New World can be seen.
Latin American literary studies have always been, in some ways – as has been already argued by many scholars – comparative. But from Antonio Candido’s remark that “a literatura brasileira é um galho secundário da literatura portuguesa” (“Brazilian literature is a secondary branch of Portuguese literature”) to recent work on contemporary Latin American literature, the meaning of “comparative” has undergone a radical transformation. This intervention seeks to track some of these changes and to theorize about the possibilities they open up for a redefinition of comparative literature for Latin American Studies, by analyzing a few works of Latin American literary studies.
Aldyr Garcia Schlee, in a 1989 article, put forward the thesis that the fictional production originating in Uruguay, Argentina and Rio Grande do Sul can be understood as a unit, proposing that it be called “gaucho literature”. This literary material would result from exchanges, intentional or not, between authors working in these regions, going beyond the limits of national and linguistic territorialities. The examination of narratives by Aldyr Garcia Schlee, taken from Contos de sempre, and by João Simões Lopes Neto, belonging to Contos gauchescos, validates the proposal, presenting itself as an alternative to nationalist Regionalism as described by the History of Brazilian Literature since the beginning of the 20th century. The parallel established with Antonio Candido’s conception, affirmed in “Literatura e subdesenvolvimento” (Literature and Underdevelopment), makes it possible to understand a South-South comparatism introjected by the literary works of the present and the past.
The article proposes an analysis of the contemporary situation of post-colonial nations and collectives based on the ideas of plurality and impermanence, based on concepts from post-colonial theories and post-modern thought. For that, the theoretical works of thinkers such as Franz Fanon, Boaventura de Sousa Santos and Walter Mignolo, among others, are referred to. These sociocultural and historical-political investigations serve as a basis for thinking about the literature of African and Afro-diasporic writers, such as Pepetela, Kalaf Epalanga, Aida Gomes, Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida and Conceição Evaristo.
The article proposes a panoramic look at the cultural assimilation policies undertaken by the Portuguese colonial regime and the composition of a cultural universe structured in the orbit of the Portuguese language and characterized by heterogeneity and diversity. The complexity and vastness of the literary corpus produced in these different spaces over the last few decades can offer important insights into the contemporary world, in which survival strategies for symbolic practices of colonial origin threaten the autonomy of individuals and populations. The article also proposes the formulation of a hypothesis: a political-cultural framework that directly involves modern and contemporary disputes over the imaginary produced in the different nation-states that make up the group of former Portuguese colonies. The central premise of this work is that the rationalities generated in southern worldviews and based on their own cosmogonies and symbolic universes, were identified as cultures of backwardness to be corrected in the civilizing processes of colonial modernity. Contemporary anti-colonial efforts imply a detailed review of the forces and vectors that acted and act in the assimilation of people and human groups to hegemonic Western rationalities so that it is possible to form a critical consciousness present in literary and essay texts and in cultural objects that outline new forms of resistance.
In a now classic essay, Roberto Schwarz (1986) distanced himself from both “left-wing and right-wing nationalisms” and their “search for a genuine national background [...] through the elimination of what is not native” (the “national by subtraction”), as well as from “a certain recent French philosophy” in the wake of which critics such as Silviano Santiago and Haroldo de Campos sought to invert the commonplace according to which “the copy is secondary to the original”, offering “a triumphalist interpretation of our backwardness”. Three decades later, João Adolfo Hansen (2016), adopting an “internationalist perspective” that simultaneously dismisses the problem of “misplaced ideas” as well as the nationalist response to it, will defend, based on Abel Barros Baptista, the “idea of literature as unconditional hospitality and translation”, thereby ignoring the profound inequalities recognized by Franco Moretti (2001) in the “literary world-system”. The problem lies in the false equivalence suggested by Hansen between “conditional hospitality” and “translation”: returning to Baptista’s propositions (2005a, 2005b, 2014), we will show that translation is imposed, in fact, precisely because unconditional hospitality in relation to literature is nothing more than a “utopia”, and that the linguistic heterogeneity that demands translation as a constitutive performance of language is precisely what allows the problem of national(ism) in the aesthetic-literary field in general, and in the comparative field in particular, to be redefined in a new key: national by translation.
The present essay explores the potentialities represented by a relational literature and criticism in Latin America; that is, one committed to multidirectional and dynamic processes not confined by the limits imposed by national, disciplinary, or formal boundaries. To this end, the theoretical foundation was established through the work of Caribbean poet and essayist Édouard Glissant, with an emphasis on the concepts of world-totality, place, diversity, and relation, combined with a decolonial perspective. Glissant’s Poetics of Relation and the contributions of decolonial studies made possible a critique of modern dichotomous structures (such as center and periphery, nature and culture, body and mind), while exploring the perception of non-obvious ethical and aesthetic consonances within contemporary Latin American literature. In this framework, the study sought to identify intercommunicative creative processes developed in Latin American contexts through a comparative analysis of works by Brazilian poet Edimilson de Almeida Pereira and Chilean writer Diamela Eltit. Recognizing that, despite their evident differences, both Pereira and Eltit explore the violence imprinted on the body of language as part of a creative attitude capable of summoning relations, the essay proposes mutilation as an operational concept for the critical reading of works that, like those selected, presuppose place as an element in the enunciation of experience in the Global South. In these terms, mutilation would constitute an aesthetic element connecting literary activities developed through the creative and reflexive appropriation of destructive actions in geopolitical and cultural contexts marked by coloniality. Concurrently, the essay itself seeks to develop as an exercise in relation, transformed into a methodological foundation for literary criticism.
