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The following essay analyzes "As enfibraturas do Ipiranga", the final poem of Paulicéia desvairada, by Mário de Andrade. The poem written in 1921, which imitates the form of a secular oratory performed by the entire population in the center of the city of São Paulo, offers an anticipatory, allegorical, and problematic vision of the modernist movement of 1922. Here, the aesthetics disputes are presented as permeated by social clashes in the open amphitheater of the city. The impasses of the modernization process in Brazil that are present in the poem continue to resonate, like an echo, a hundred years after its writing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers a perspective on the national problem present in the brasilian regionalist novel A bagaceira (1928), by José Américo de Almeida. Its main character, Lucio, young reformer of the nordestine fazenda, tries to found a new national community by binding together two confronted cultural worlds: the brejo and the sertão. First, I derivate the structure of the novelistic world from Lucio´s personality; according to this, the reading of nature (sensible world) provides the knowledge of the brasilian culture. Nonetheless, the national synthesis fails because Lucio doesn´t consider this reading nor does he transform its inherited image. My thesis is that this situation is due to an epistemological shift: from the medieval model, which recognises the imaginary as valid foundation for effective knowledge, to the modern model, that detaches the imaginary from the realm of experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The following article pretends to describe the first years of the work by Brazilian critic Antonio Candido between 1941 and 1945. The purpose is to identify the main features of what he calls his "functional critique" and to understand the theoretical and methodological difficulties that will led him to abandon this kind of critique. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on the aphoristic work Cadernos de joão (1957) by Brazilian writer Aníbal Machado, this article reflects on the relationship between aphorism and the poetics of archipelization whose main features have been outlined by Gaston Bachelard, the French Surrealists, and most notably by French Caribbean writer Edouard Glissant. We postulate that Cadernos de João anticipates an aphoristic postcolonial writing inclined to the intuitive, the unexpected, and the fragmentary, thus reflecting a world in a condition of archipelization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the past few decades, Latin American literature has developed a trend towards a realist mode of representation, which is intended to re-establish the link between literature and factual reality, with an explicit political and social commitment. At the same time, it challenges traditional modes of representation, which are no longer sustainable in the context of the transformation of the social, political and economic structures of our time, which changes our perception of reality. It thus challenges the capacity of literary language to represent the concrete and historical reality. In this context, Eles eram muitos cavalos (Luiz Ruffato 2001) emerges as one of the most complex and extreme examples of this trend. This paper studies the elements that lead us to consider this novel as a case of this critical return to realism, with particular emphasis on some of the literary devices and techniques to which it recurs, belonging to three main dimensions: compromise, representation and language, analysing the critical sense in which they are used. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Brazilian writer João Gilberto Noll is well known both in Brazil and in other countries because of his particular poetry, built into a copious narrative production that emerged in 1980 with the publication of the collection of stories O Cego e a Dançarina, and which continues to be highly fertile even now. In the opinion of the Argentine scholar Reinaldo Laddaga (2007), João Gilberto Noll is one of the writers who has published some of the most innovative narratives seen in recent times, and not only in Latin America. The singularity of Noll's literature has attracted the attention of critics and has spawned many studies that have been published in a significant volume of theses, books, articles, papers, etc. In this extensive body of critical studies there are divergent positions on Noll's literature. Many of them attribute significant value to Noll's literary production considering the degree of innovation that shows to be positive in relation to the more expressive behavior displayed by the novel genre throughout modernity. However, there are many other critics who argue that the lack of identification of Noll's narratives with the novel genre is due to certain formal and thematic peculiarities. Considering the singularity of Nollian narrative production and studying his last novel, Solidão Continental (2012), we seek to understand what this singularity could be expressing and examine the impacts of this singularity on the field of Brazilian literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]