Earl E. Fitz

Comparative Cultural Studies and Latin America

This is the second annual of CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, a thematic volume with selected papers from material published in the journal in volumes 3.1-4 (2001) and 4.1-4 (2002).

Internationalizing the Literature of the Portuguese-Speaking World

This article argues that the literature of the Portuguese-speaking world can and should seek to internationalize itself in the early decades of the twenty-first century and that there are five contexts which should prove to be effective vehicles in helping to do this: Latin American literature; inter-American literature; Europe; Africa; and world literature. In each category, the author offers some specific examples of how this might be done, that is, specific authors, texts, themes, or issues that the literature of the Portuguese-speaking world might address to increase its international visibility.

Writing Womanhood in the New Brazil: Machado’s Lição de Botânica

This chapter offers an analysis of Machado’s representation of female characters through critical readings of his short stories and his understudied theatrical works, particularly Licao da Botânica(Botanical Lesson). More than mere props or foils for his more famous male characters, Machado’s fictional women possess their own narrative logic and their functions are quite distinct from those of his better-known male characters. Machado’s fictional women are also the mechanism by which he shows his reading public (made up largely of women) that a new, more socially conscious woman is part of what the new Brazil needs as it creates its post-emancipation and post-empire era.

The Complete Stories

The appearance of any new book of literature by Clarice Lispector is an occasion for celebration. And The Complete Stories is no exception to this rule. But in this case, we have been gifted a lagniappe since this new tome has brought together, for the first time, all of Lispector’s many and varied short stories. The Complete Stories is thus a major development for students, scholars, and admirers of the Brazilian author’s haunting, unsettling, and not infrequently funny short fiction, a genre for which some celebrate her even more than for her also extraordinary novels. For readers who do not know Lispector in her original Brazilian Portuguese, the information to be gleaned from the “Translator’s Note” at the back will be of immense value. Here, Katrina Dodson comments on Lispector’s brilliantly unique style and about how she went about recreating it in modern English. Happily, Dodson succeeds, with only a few exceptions, in recreating the beguiling and mystifying characteristics of Lispector’s style and of her (some have thought) idiosyncratic system of punctuation. In the early story, “Amor/Love,” the reader is given the following lines: “Junto dela havia uma senhora de azul, com um rostro. Desviou o olhar depressa.” Dodson renders these words thusly: “Next to her was a lady in blue, with a face. She averted her gaze, quickly.” As can be easily seen, Dodson’s version hews closely to the diction and structure of Lispector’s original line, and the result nicely maintains the original’s sense of mystery and magic. Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas, Issue 92/93, Vol. 49, Nos. 1–2, 2016, 206–207

Clarice Lispector as a Northeastern Writer

Often associated with the intellectual and artistic world of Rio de Janeiro, where she resided for a good portion of her life and where she gained international celebrity, Clarice Lispector is not commonly thought of as a Northeastern writer. But she is, and profoundly so. The northeast part of Brazil, where Clarice and her family had emigrated in the early 1920s, always occupied a powerful place in her imagination, her sense of self identity, and her writing. Present from the beginning, this close and visceral identification with the Northeast, its language, its culture, and its tormented history, would percolate through her middle years as she steadily gained recognition as one of modern Brazilian literature’s most revered authors. And, by the end of her life, in 1977, it would flower in her unforgettable final novel, The Hour of the Star. Clarice’s northeastern roots run deep. She was two months old when her parents left their tiny Ukrainian village and journeyed to Alagoas, in northeastern Brazil. Soon after arriving, the family moved again, this time to Recife, in the northeastern state of Pernambuco; there Clarice’s father, hard pressed to provide for his family, found better employment, initially in agriculture but later in the world of business and commerce. In spite of the family’s impecunious circumstances, however, Clarice once said, in Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas, Issue 92/93, Vol. 49, Nos. 1–2, 2016, 43–48

Native American Literature and Its Place in the Inter-American Project

Abstract Issues of Native American literature and culture are placed in a comparative and inter-American perspective, where texts from Canada, the United States, Spanish America, and Brazil are discussed and contrasted. Native American texts are analyzed in the context of inter-American literary study, which is defined as an interdisciplinary approach to the literatures of North, Central, and South America. The argument is made that Native American literature represents the cultural and historical foundation of the entire inter-American project.

Backlands: The Canudos Campaign

The appearance of a new and successful re-translation of an established classic is always an event of major importance in the world of letters. That a powerful and disturbing text of enduring social, political, and intellectual significance can be made to come alive for yet another generation of readers beyond its original ken testifies not only to the reason some books live on through time but to the important role that translators play in their impact and reception. Such is the case with Elizabeth Lowe’s new English version of Euclides da Cunha’s great Brazilian masterpiece, Os Sertões (1902), which Penguin Classics has just re-issued with an introduction by Ilan Stavans. In a variety of ways, Lowe’s version gets us closer to the voice of da Cunha than we have ever been before. Whereas the venerable Putnam translation of 1944 took some liberties with the original text and too often smoothes out its rough spots as well as da Cunha’s sometimes tangled self-presentation in it, Lowe restores for us the author’s personal sense of doubt that so permeates the book. Then, too, while Putnam, who is clearly moved by the poignancy of Os Sertões , is led at times to overly dramatize the events, both large and small, of the Canudos Rebellion, Lowe, ever conscious of da Cunha’s complex, protean voice, brings out, but without undue embellishment, the confusion, the violence, and the epic grandeur of the struggle being recounted. This tendency toward candor and directness is evident in Lowe’s rendition of what is perhaps Os Sertões ’s single most famous moment, when da Cunha bluntly asserts the lesson that must be learned from the debacle at Canudos: ‘‘It was clear that the Canudos campaign had to have a higher goal than the stupid one of wiping out a backlands town. Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas, Issue 82, Vol. 44, No. 1, 2011, 169 170

Salvador da Bahia and Rio de Janeiro: An Inter-American Perspective

As diverse as it is, Brazilian literature has tended to gravitate around two urban poles, Salvador da Bahia in the north and Rio de Janeiro in the south. Founded in 1549 and regarded as Brazil’s oldest official city, Salvador was the nation’s vibrant colonial capital until 1763. Rio was founded in 1565 when Estácio de Sá sailed into what is now Guanabara Bay and, recognizing its strategic importance, claimed it and its environs for Portugal (which was seeking to wrest control of this vital area from the French, who had already established a colony there in 1555, ‘‘Antarctic France’’). Although other geographic, ethnic, and creative centers have been, and continue to be, important to Brazil’s intellectual development, Salvador and Rio remain the nation’s cultural lodestones, the two Brazilian locales that still resonate most immediately with people around the globe. In the United States, what professional comparatists call a nation’s mirage (the general sense of a nation as seen from abroad) is, for Brazil, closely bound up with the auras that surround these two cities. Many African Americans, as well as many white Americans, have wanted to experience first-hand Brazil’s deeply rooted and still vital African heritage. Such has been the case with writers as diverse as Toni Morrison, Gayl Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas, Issue 83, Vol. 44, No. 2, 2011, 197 203