RCAAP Repository

This article presents an account of A ronda das Americas (Around the Americas) by Jorge Amado. The book is a collection of travel logs written by the author while journeying throughout the Americas in 1937. The analysis focuses on the similarities and differences established by the Bahian novel writer regarding cultural diversity in Brazil mainly between the Southern and Northeastern regions. The objective is to understand the writer’s view of regional in a historic cultural context in Brazil which is marked by the division North/South. In order to reach such objective it is important to consoefer Amado’s participation in the literary field of the 30s, his political affiliation as well as his commitment with revolutionary art in harmony with his time.

Mar Morto, one of the most representative texts by writer Jorge Amado, updates important myths of the Lusitanian tradition, as pointed out by Gilbert Durand, and features a character who is the embodiment of the ideals of a mythical lusitanidade, through his warrior attributes. Guma, Jorge Amado’s most popular sailor, brings in its path a heroic conduct worthy of the imaginary knighthood. Guma is a predestined character, who does not conform to the limits imposed. He carries with him an impossible audacity, which makes him being chosen by the goddess Yemanjá, his faithful protectress. This Galaaz from Bahia, in dialogue with the A Demanda do Santo Graal, will be allocated a heroic place in the imagination of the people of the docks: the mystic savior who will return one day.

The article presents an analysis of the novel Gabriela Clove and Cinnamon by Jorge Amado with a focus on the representation of the body based on the concepts of grotesque and carnivalesque put forward by Mikhail Bakhtin. The images and references to the body are discussed as they are projected in the narrative as well as the cultural critical dimension these images convey. Firstly, an analysis of the grotesque system of images is presented considering its deviant characteristic in relation to the esthetic model of bodies as known in Western tradition. Secondly, in the Amadian text, the representation of the body of the character Gabriela are taken as representative of this carnavalized universe ewhich defies laws and contentions well established in the so called official culture.

This article, based on the novel As velhas, by the Bahian writer Adonias Filho, analyses how each one of the four women, the main characters, revivify, through the exuberant and reckless landscape of the rainforest, the history of the hostile and male world, the Bahian cocoa universe and the history of the territorial conquest of a region. At the same time, these women narrate their pains, sufferings and revenges. By using the memory and the constitution of the identity of the characters, women and men, the purpose of this analysis is to understand how this memoirist narrative is built, through the materialization of the tensions which are modeled in the experiences and in the individual and collective histories of each subject and its culture.

This text pays homage to the Bahian writer Jônatas Conceição da Silva. Utilizing a brief summary of his poetic work and intellectual activities, it seeks to demonstrate the strategies the author used in disseminating aspects of the Afro-Brazilian tradition, not only through his poetry but also through other intellectual endeavors, in which his commitment to disseminating Afro-Brazilian culture and history became evident. A poet who identified as Afro-Brazilian, Jônatas Conceição left a series of poems and stories in which his life history, his memory and Afro-Brazilian memory in a wider sense are presented in language that is both accessible and politically engaged. In this paper, the reader will learn about the life and intellectual production of a poet for whom writing was a way of intervening in literary, cultural and political life.

The concepts of “place” and “no place” (Marc Augé) comprise one the tools to do the reading of two contemporary texts which look into the old town of Salvador, especially Pelourinho and Tabuão. The first – extract from an internetchain known as “Salvador, learning and having fun” – Salvador, para aprender e se diverter – which was on the net right after the carnival of 2011. The second – a tale named “O visitante invisível” – The invisible visitor – by Carlos Ribeiro. Displaying some humor, the text points out the old town fleeing and its withdrawing from everyday life. Thus, a “no-place” is established. Such narrative also builds on remarks through the geography of the old town of Salvador, but the chosen itinerary adopts a quite unique perspective, given that meaningful connections with past life experiences are depicted. There is a subjective temporality. Thus, the “place” is set.

Comparative study between Cyro Martins’ novel Um menino vai para o colégio and the namesake’s short film by Liliana Sulzbach and Marcello Lima, focusing on how each one approaches the end of the character’s childhood, while it signalizes the start of a new stage of Carlos’ life. Reflecting about the representation of this traditional break between boy and man is the theme of this essay, which also tries to think about the regional expression of childhood.

The article presents the preliminary results of the research project entitled “The new-new Bahian tred seen from afar”. The aim of the project is to learn how gauchos perceive films produced in Bahia between 2001 and 2011. The investigation is based on a comparison between Bahian literary production of the period, mainly featured movies, with the same time of movies exibit in cinemas in Porto Alegre. It is an attempt to understand how a set of films was interpreted by newspaper cinema critics, including not mentioning them, in Porto Alegre at the time the films were being exhibited in local theaters. The article points at central issues regarding Brazilian cinema today such as the important dimensions of the regionalization and cinema exhibition in Brazil.

Machado de Assis (Algumas notas sobre o “humour”), written by the journalist, essayist and short-story author Alcides Maya (1877-1984), and published in Rio de Janeiro in 1912, is a remarkable debut book, published after Machado de Assis’ death. In this book, Maya takes issue with the analysis carried out by essayist and historian Silvio Romero, in his 1897 book Machado de Assis, concerning the use of humor, as well as examines Machado’s place in the history of Brazilian literature. Near its 100th anniversary, Maya’s book remains an important and updated reference for Machado’s studies.

This article discusses the relations between politics and literature in the 20th Century in Bahia. It highlights the trajectory of “men of letters” and the importance of the newspaper editorial rooms as places for intellectual and literary formation. It focuses on Bahian writers works that used political issues as main themes in their Romanesque narratives in the second half of the 20th Century. In Bahia, literary men played important roles in party politics. Writing practices undertook a political role by mediating the conducts of people who were involved in debates on collective or individual interest issues and emphasizing the tensions and its developments. In this article, history, literature and politics are associated to the concepts of individual and collective memory, imaginary and power.

Analysis of the conference by Clodomir Vianna Moog, to be presented in the book under the title An interpretation of Brazilian literature, which presents an interpretive system of cultural nuclei, whose composition forms the heterogeneous complex of Brazilian literature, featuring a cultural archipelago which consists of seven autonomous and differentiated islands.

According with the Portuguese imaginary, Brazil as a country and the Brazilian as it has been glossed in Portuguese culture since Pero Vaz de Caminha`s letter. Thus, what does it mean to postulate the existence of a Brazilian language, which is also ring-fenced in relation to the matrix language that is Portuguese, a language of colonial diffusion and deployment. In order to achieve the purpose of this paper, As Pupilas do Senhor Reitor (1867) by Júlio Dinis e O Crime do Padre Amaro by Eça de Queirós will be taken as a starting point, both are testimonies collected in Portuguese fiction of the nineteenth century.

.

The present investigation is dedicated to the study of the Brazilian Portuguese children’s morphological knowledge and its relation with levels of mental representations as postulated by the Representational Redescription model (KARMILOFF-SMITH, 1992). The data consist of regularized verbal forms, changes of inflectional suffixes as well as lexical novelty (morphological variant forms) taken from spontaneous speech and of three morphological tests, which involve derivation and inflection of nonce words, extraction of nonce base from derived nonce words, and judgment of words as well as a metalinguistic explanation. The survey of the responses reveals morphological knowledge that goes from sensitivity – morphological variant forms – to linguistic awareness – morphology tests. Thus, the data pointed to the plausibility of all the different levels of representation across development. In our view, this work embodies a first step towards an explanation of the mental representations that underlie both the comprehension and production of children’s growing morphological knowledge and goes beyond the simple implicit/explicit dichotomy used in most previous work.

.

Guimarães Rosa relates his art with the Brazilian literary tradition and the universal one as the author of an esthetic and social act. This relationship is expressed through a literary form that brings together the representation of sertão, a main reference; and an evaluation of this reference from Rosa’s particular point of view, which is communicated to the addressee and to the reader in his texts. Many critical texts were produced about Rosa and his works, but an important critique, after a lot of content’s interpretation, is the esthetic and political intervention by the literary form of Rosa in the canon.

Study of the Corpo de baile, by Guimarães Rosa which aims to understand how the dispersion of the first characters of the story, their regrouping in the intermediate novels and their final reintegration, form the grooves that bind the whole. In addition, we aim to exam how these compositional elements that sustain the unity of the book also have an ideological background, in other words, how it presents a view of history and a conception of life and of the world.

Guimarães Rosa’s Grande sertão: veredas has a large critical fortune that arises from many different approaches. This study seeks to revisit the different lines which can be used to approach Rosa’s text. Also, it aims to identify the characteristics of each approach related with Guimarães’ books. As well as scholars who follow these lines of discussion in their works.

Read according to the perception of the narrative voice of zero focalization, “A hora e a vez de Augusto Matraga” presents to the reader the itinerary of the protagonist: a linear journey of suffering, temptations and transformations leading to a final destiny that presumably gathers in harmony the ups and downs of the journey. Aware of this perspective proposed by the narrator, major critics of Guimarães Rosa have perceived the story of Nhô Augusto as a Christian narrative of ascesis in three stages that, although defined in different ways, could be understood in terms of sin, penitence and redemption. This essay intends to explore the dimension of detours and disruptions that disturbs this linear trajectory, compromising it with profound marks of ambiguities and uncertainties. Read in this way, the text presents the reader not only with a destiny, but with what Jacques Derrida calls “destinerrances”: a “destiny” that tries, unsuccessfully, to deny the possibility of those alternative side routes which ultimately challenge the significance of the happy ending of the narrative of ascesis.

This study is the intersection of psychoanalytic and literary discourses in reading Rosa’s Grande sertão: veredas. Based on the idea that the subject is revealed only by the language, it is natural to establish the links between literary criticism, psychoanalysis and language. Thus, the text is where we can find the subjectivity so, literary text is seen here as the privileged place of its revelation, through the rhetorical resources. The objective of this paper is to point out a reading of the novel Grande sertão: veredas, by using psychoanalytic instruments.