Repositório RCAAP

This essay seeks to highlight some contemporary readings of the novel The Life and opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, written by Laurence Sterne. From this general purpose, two complementary goals are established: articulate the passage of "mimesis" to "performance" on the novel by Sterne and check its productivity to a reinterpretation of the concept of Weltliteratur (world literature) starting from Erich Auerbach.

Review of "Cacau, vozes e orixás na escrita de Jorge Amado" organized by Biagio D’Angelo and Márcia Rios.

Presentation of the Literature issue on Weltliteratur Today

We intend to study in this text as Jorge de Lima if it uses of the inspiration (the dreamlike is the element which provides the poetic impulse), the technical work (the plight of the language by the poetic exercise) and the memory (from childhood and in his ancestral sense, from the mythical Muse figure) for the elaboration of the Livro de Sonetos, elements that disclose the conception poetical of its lyric end.

Issues regarding the organization and processing of the bilingual mental lexicon present a challenge for researchers interested in investigating second language acquisition. Research related to the memory of words for the bilingual’s two languages present different results, which intensify this debate. On one side of this debate, researchers support a theory that there is a shared storage for the lexicons of the first and second languages; on the other side, researchers support a theory that storage is separate. This debate also raises questions related to the activation of the bilingual’s two languages during lexical production. The present paper reviews two models of bilingual lexical and semantic memory (RHM and BIA+) and the studies associated with the models. The goal is to address whether semantic memory of the bilingual’s two languages is represented in an integrated way.

This paper discusses relevant issues to urban space, specifically the city of Curitiba, its disposal (urban mapping) , its symbols and images that emerge from the official discourse to ratify the popular ideas concepts like “model city” , “capital development”, “rare jewel” and “capital of sustainability”. These concepts will be challenged through the narratives of Dalton Trevisan, who has presented a Curitiba with no pine, no flowers and no monuments, because it is not his intention to present this beautiful city, but a marginal Curitiba and dystopian, populated by the poor, vagrants, prostitutes, crazy people, finally, for real men, marked by inequalities, hunger, pain and anguish. Dalton Trevisan includes the suburbs and misery of man, presenting the fragmented hopelessly marginal and exploited. These ideas are arranged in the work - synthesis of Dalton Trevisan. “Em busca de Curitiba perdida” (1992), published on the occasion of the commemoration of the 300th anniversary of the Curitiba foundation, in a way of protest to show that the city has two sides: the center and margin and that from this margin echoes the song of mourning its Curitiba of yore. In order to corroborate the ideas presented and defended, this article presents an analysis of the short story “Cemitário de Elefantes”, which allows the visualization of a shameless urban space, in ruins and in continuous transformation.

In a cultural and social context the idea of boundary is an unfolding of the idea of Nation, both seen as discursive constructions therefore with symbolic implications. The boundary is built from the difference, it is molded close to the Otherness and needs it to be determined. The boundary, then, denounces the tensions between two spaces: the inside and outside, the Self and the Other. At the same time, it promotes imbrications between its binary pairs, resulting in a hybrid zone where contact occurs between the separated poles, space in which they are put face to face. Based on this idea of border, this article aims to discuss the symbolic boundaries observed in the novel The Brothers, by Milton Hatoum. The narrative questions the cultural and identity hybridism resulting from border areas, showing the confrontations and flows that are verified in the border space from the figure of the immigrant and the mestizo. As Homi Bhabha suggests, in this work the boundaries are conceived as bridges that act in a movement of “ambulatory articulation, ambivalent”. The borderline is, therefore, what one might call in-between, an interstice.

"This story begins at ground level, by footsteps." These words introduce "The speech of lost steps", a chapter of Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life. Certeau understands the act of walking as an enunciative process. He says: "There is a rhetoric of walking. The art of shaping phrases is equivalent to the art of shaping pathways "(DE CERTEAU, 2000, 179). However, according to him, we can define the practice of space in such an onirical conception like "Walking is lacking of space. It is the indefinite process of being absent and in search of your own "(DE CERTEAU, 2000, 183). "If you should walk, just put one foot after the other. One foot after the other "(LISBOA, 2007, p. 9). With this sentence, Brazilian writer Adriana Lisboa begins her novel Rakushisha. Celina, her main character, is a woman that walks and writes. The narrative structure of this novel is developed in three overlapping actions: from Rio de Janeiro to Japan, Celina moves in a way that we could think at Marc Augé’s concept of non-places of supermodernity; however, to remain anonymous and be able to become similar, Celina needs to recover her identity by "signing a contract" with other users of a non-place; for doing so, the lecture of the Daily Saga, written by the seventeenth century Japanese poet Matsuo Basho, will help her to look at the mirror and recognize herself as 'one'. A mirror as the "mixed and median experience ”, according to Michel Foucault, between utopia (ideal model) and heterotopia (real model).

Paloma Vidal, in her first novel, Algum lugar (2009), presents a "writing of the self" that enables a stroll around some major modern metropolises while we travel along the pages of a young student and teacher’s diary. Her text, marked by references to canonical works and authors, is based on reminiscences that turn the work into an attempt to find and identify oneself with spaces, people and other texts, in the past and present. Moreover, the Argentine writer, who lives in Brazil since her childhood, discusses in her novel the deterritorialization condition of the migrant, who, by living in another country, faces the loneliness and the consequences of diaspora. This article aims at building a reflection on such topic, which occupies a central place in the current scene, caused by the globalization of culture that appears in literary works such as Paloma Vidal’s. The analyzes are supported by references derived mainly from Cultural Studies, such as Edward Said (2003), Zygmunt Bauman (1998, 2001) and Stuart Hall (2003).

This paper presents the results of an acceptability judgment task. The task was carried out using a magnitude estimation paradigm and aimed at investigating the behavior of highly proficient Brazilian Portuguese-English bilinguals upon reading grammatical and ungrammatical sentences in English. These sentences, in turn, instantiated a resultative construction. The results suggest that the bilinguals and the English monolinguals made similar judgments for the acceptability of the grammatical resultative construction. However, the bilinguals showed higher acceptance of ungrammatical resultative construction than the monolinguals. The present study corroborates the understanding that the level of learnability of construction may be associated with the relation between the L1 and L2 involved. Furthermore, the results suggest that this relation is not sufficient to make bilingual as sensitive to rules as native speakers.

This study aims at analyzing certain verve of contemporary Brazilian fiction that, opposing the building of an apprehensible past, chooses to drown through the meshes of dissolution, blurring/distorting the memory of one’s experience. We intend to deal here specifically with the memories of war. For that, we are going to analyze excerpts from two fiction texts published in the second half of 20th century, separated by certain period of time: the novel Vaca de nariz sutil (1961), by Campos de Carvalho, and the novella “O oco” (1973), by Hilda Hilst. The narrators of both texts intend to build memories of a war they lived, but such memories lack precise space and time references: we only know that there was a war, but it is impossible do determine when or where it happened, and even against whom or the reason why they were fighting.

The present work is related to the research group "Crítica e imaginário na literature sul-rio-grandense”. This article analyses the novel Onde andará Dulce Veiga? By Caio Fernando Abreu on the perspective of the narrative´s construction which translates the hero´s trajectory, in a symbolic dimension. The analysis is a rereading of the labyrinth myth, showing the main character’s pilgrimagein his labyrinthine path in a Brazilian metropolis. The analysis shows how the contemporarywork in its symbolic construction, represents the paths of the hero´s adventure, as well as identifying in the work the images that unveil the contemporary subject searching for the notion of identity through the recuperation of the memories.

Ideally, readers build meaningful and coherent mental representations of the texts they read (Kintsch; van Dijk, 1978; van Dijk; Kintsch, 1983; Gagné et al., 1993), and they are able to express such mental representations in summaries and recall protocols. Furthermore, strategic readers approach a text keeping in mind the reading situation, i.e., reading purposes and text type, while monitoring their comprehension (Carrell, 1989; 1998; Paris; Lipson; Wixson, 1983; Paris; Wasik; Turner, 1991). The present study aims at investigating to what extent eight Brazilian university-level students are strategic when producing written summaries of an expository text in English as L2. Participants took part in a workshop on how to produce summaries from expository texts in English and their production was collected and analyzed in terms of how strategic they were in displaying controlling, central and secondary ideas. Participants were proficient and strategic readers in both L1 and L2 (Portuguese and English, respectively), and were knowledgeable of academic genres. Therefore, it was hypothesized that they would be able to construct a meaningful and coherent representation of the text, while monitoring their reading comprehension, which, in turn, was expected to be reflected in their production of summaries. Results revealed that the majority of the participants were strategic when approaching the text and could build a coherent mental representation of it, while some of the participants omitted some central and secondary ideas. 

The ability to compute hierarchical recursive structures, such as those found in natural grammars, has been identified as a key feature for distinguishing humans from other primates (HAUSER; CHOMSKY; FITCH, 2002). This kind of structure, however, does not seem to be exclusive to the domain of natural language. In strictly structural terms, a parallel can be drawn between linguistic sentences and numerical expressions. Specifically, in both cases there may be structures with center-embedding. This paper aims to address the notion of linguistic recursion, within the framework of Generative Theory, and to report experimental results. A self-paced reading experiment was designed to explore a priming effect in the processing of recursive structures associated with different cognitive domains, namely, language and numerical cognition. The data do not support the idea that the processing of similar structures is affected by cross-domain syntactic priming. The results are discussed in the light of a concept of an interface between an on-line model of linguistic computation and of current evidence from the field of neuroscience.

This paper aims to present the results from a study that investigated the performance of children in reading comprehension tasks. The participants were enrolled in the 2nd and 3rd grades of a public elementary school in the metropolitan area of Porto Alegre. We applied a questionnaire that included eight questions about a story read by the participants. The evaluation was applied at two different moments during the reading of two different stories. In addition to the questionnaire, we evaluated evidence of a household environment that stimulated literacy, by means of interviews with the participants, and the level of schooling of the participants. The results show that participants had an adequate level of comprehension for the tasks. The answers given by participants indicate that their performance ranged from high to medium.

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All it took was the arrival of a young body in the cell full of old men worn out by the World’s pain, for something to happen that morning. This is the case of the play Barrela (1958), by the Brazilian writer Plínio Marcos (1935-1999), whose dense narrative, full of intense dialogues and cleaved by multiple affects, allows us to think about a whole conception of humanity, subjectivity and institutionality in the Brazilian prison space during the 1960s and 1970s. The text analyzes the image of the violated young body, describing the intersections of class, gender, generation and sexuality that split a collective subjectivity based on pain and the reproduction of physical and psychological violence. However, it avoids incurring processes of individualization or psychologization of violence, but precisely seeking to think about the subjectivation technologies that Plínio Marcos’s literature allows to analyze in order to think about the affects, perceptions and tensions that his writing presents. From the dialogue with Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Maurice Blanchot, we seek to think about the relations between History and Literature, questioning the ways of giving reality to read through writing and social criticism operated in the midst of dark times. In this way, the article aims to contribute through an experimentation exercise to think about Brazilian history and the history of the young body from a literary source that, as a work of art, can always open other ways of thinking and feeling. Such a process allows us to think of literature as an ethical-political creation gesture about the world and life.

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Recently, historians such as Paulo Knauss and Peter Burke affirmed the importance of visual sources as an object of research for History, and that the encounter with imagery sources would occur soon and a historiographic evaluation of this process would be necessary. Based on the premise that this historiographic renewal has already taken place, this article intends to draw general lines on the theme Historiography and Image in the international and national circuit. Thus highlighting the international “imagery turns” and the paths of formation of Brazilian intellectual networks that dedicated themselves to the subject. Therefore, highlighting the historiographic renewal in the Graduate Programs, relevant authors, as well as works and books. In this way we composed a short History of Historiography on the use of images as a historical source.

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