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This article examines the Afrodescendant literature in Brazil today. According to scholars, Latin America was created, on the one hand, by a modern/colonial project, and on the other hand, identity specifications are still on debate. So, it is important to examine Afrodescendant literature as representative of silenced cultures, who, in this context, write of themselves. In the reading and in the analysis of literary texts from Afrobrazilian authors, I demonstrate that metalanguage and intertextuality with literature and history are some aspects of this production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present article discusses the concepts of black literature and Afro-Brazilian literature from the existing debates in Brazilian history and literary criticism, taking as a reference the production of Afro-descendent authors from the 19th and 20th centuries. Also, it tries to estabilish a group of elements that, once reunited, may present references of distinction that provide the especificity of the Afro-Brazilian literature in contrast with Brazilian mainstream literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims at investigating how animals have been portrayed by some modern Brazilian writers, such as Machado de Assis, Guimarães Rosa, Graciliano Ramos, Clarice Lispector e João Alphonsus. The purpose is to discuss the ways in which those authors deal with the so-called “animal question" and refuse to enclose the animals within the boundaries of the allegory and the metaphorical representation. It may be said that their works, far from being mere erudite restorations of the “bestiary" genre, are fictional and poetic spaces for critical reflection on literary and ethical matters related to the animal world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Current article studies the main events in the schooling of the writer, politician and educator Mário Palmério (1916-1996), author of Vila dos Confins (1956) and Chapadão do Bugre (1965). Foregrounded on the analysis of primary documents, research concentrated on learning within the home and schooling in the primary, secondary, military and higher schools. A survey has been made on the experiences that influenced his ideas in the educational, political and literary fields. Results show that his relationship with nature, regionalist and nationalist ideas and his imaginary on the Amazon forest were highly affected by his schooling during childhood and adolescence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A literary criticism of the book “A morte e a morte de Quincas Berro Dágua” by Brazilian author Jorge Amado is presented. It analyzes the main character of the novel based on the work of British sociologist Anthony Giddens. Subjects discussed include the idea of self-identity in modern societies, dissociation between body and identity, and death.

This work presents Makunaima as the main character of the best-known and extensive oral legendary tradition of the inhabitants from the extreme north of South America, the triple border between Brazil, Venezuela and Guyana -etnographically designated as the circum-Roraima region, in order to examine the cultural role this character had before becoming the "heroe of our people" through the work of Mário de Andrade. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work aims to study the novel Encarnação (1877), by José de Alencar, in search to the wonderful perspective that does not appear among the author's literary criticism. Encarnação is the last novel written and published by the author in life, a few months before his death, in which the novelist seems to propose a different theme, never explored before in his production. We understand that the wonderful perspective, according to Todorov (2008) does not usually take place in José de Alencar's production, however, it appears in Encarnação and determines the interpretation of the action of its characters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The intellectual relationship between Antonio Candido and Ángel Rama since 1960, intended to modify the long tradition of frustrated attempts to unify the Brazilianthought with in a Latin American thought. The present article analyses the influence Candido’s Formação da literatura brasileira (1959) and Literatura y Sociedad (1965) had in Rama’s transculturation model, developed thorough fully in his book Transculturación narrativa en América Latina (1982), as well as how this intellectual dialogue founded an original critical language that pursued to integrate the Brazilian literature as a part of a continental literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay intends to apprehend the figure of the character-narrator of Memórias póstumas de Brás Cubas through the analysis of its three main determinations: the free style of the deceased author, the phenomenology of the underground man, and the apprehension of the social type. The relationship between these different approaches (constructive, existential and socio-typological) is not one of mutual exclusion, bur rather a dialectic one. The result is intended to be the concrete concept, in the Hegelian sense of multiple determination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this essay, we analyze a short story by Machado de Assis, "Um homem célebre," in which the reader follows the frustrated trajectory of the character Pestana, a pianist and composer of polkas. Our approach is based on two theories that are not obviously compatible: Antonio Candido's perspective of the formation of Brazilian Literature, and the notion of torsion as outlined by August Ferdinand Moebius and commented by Jacques Lacan. Our aim is to demonstrate that, by maintaining an ironic distance in relation to the events of the story, the narrator performs the formative synthesis of the torsion whose existence the character is unable to perceive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It has become commonplace to describe Machado de Assis's characters and narrators as deeper than those of his contemporaries, and his novels as representations more creatively ambiguous than most literary depictions of nineteenth-century Brazil. In this essay I argue that throughout his novels psychological depth is a function of moral imagination; and a troubled moral imagination is a necessary condition for the literary representation of the modern self. Machado's protagonists are able to fashion the public presentation of their selves by imagining alternatives to their origins, desires, and social predicaments. They have in their pasts a burden the,v need to overcome, and while doing so they find themselves in conditions of freedom and harm. Evil then arises as a consequence of moral dynamism, in solar as it becomes a project for undoing the other. The genesis or a radical conception of free will and evil in Machado's narratives goes back to his translation of Victor Hugo's The Toilers of the Sea (1866). His concern with a more meticulous characterization of inwardness deepens between Iaiá Garcia (1878) and Dom Casmurro (1899), when adopting the structure or a confessional narrative he arrives at a balance between disguised motives (malice), double chronology (nostalgia), and human life as an unfolding, reversible, and self-aware process (metamorphosis). To frame Machado's strategy for depicting moral change, I take from Augustine's Confessions the suggestion that retrospection is the only way of restoring the identity of someone whose self is marked by his or her sense of dissimilarity with the past. Finally, from Kant and Paul Ricoeur I draw the elements for a further consideration of evil as an invitation to think differently about seeing, judging, and narrating human life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the topics addressed in this issue of the journal including tendencies in the study of texts by Brazilian author Machado de Assis, the translation and reception of his literary works and literary criticism of his fiction.

The article presents an analysis of Brazilian poetry for children from the 18th century to the last decade of the 20th century. According to the author, poetry for children in Brazil emerged as a literary genre at the end of the 19th century, since most poems were meant for family events. An historical overview of the main Brazilian poetry from the 18th century to the 20th century is given. Particular focus is given to the early works of Alvarenga Peixoto at the end of the 18th century, and the translations made by Tatiana Belinky during the 20th century.