There is much in Freire's educational philosophy that can be helpful in the reading of a fictional work; similarly, in engaging fiction, the understanding of key Freirean principles can be deepened. These dual possibilities become evident in reflecting on his countryman Lima Barreto's novel, "The Sad End of Policarpo Quaresma" (Barreto,…

A central theme throughout Machado de Assis's works is the way characters look at each other inside and outside houses. This article argues that vision, race, and houses define his narrative strategies in the short stories "Pai contra Mãe" and "O Caso da Vara," and the novels "Dom Casmurro," "Memórias póstumas de…

Reluctance to embrace change leaves societies vulnerable to the rise of authoritarian political ideologies, particularly during times of socioeconomic and political crises. Public schools have seen an increase in incidents where fundamentalist groups with differing agendas have attempted to pressure them into adopting curricula whose literacy…

Lygia Fagundes Telles's novel "As meninas" portrays the oppressive social atmosphere of Brazil's authoritarian military dictatorship in a way that few other novels accomplish. Though the novel eschews the documentary "romance-reportagem" mode famously adopted by other writers from the period, "As meninas" provides a…

Despite apparent connections between Brazilian and Spanish American narratives, comparative scholarship has only recently begun to investigate actively these important points of contact. In this study, we introduce a vital crossover between the two traditions, involving Juan Rulfo and Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis. Rulfo's outspoken affinity for…

In this article, Adria Frizzi provides a brief overview of Fred Ellison's work in the field of literary translation. Frizzi does so by outlining Ellison's trajectory as a translator--highlighting how his choices in this area of his scholarship fit into a broader, multipronged approach to the study and diffusion of the language, culture, and…

Newspaper coverage of the Canudos War dehumanized the "sertanejos," portraying them in such a way that empathy or grief for their suffering was inaccessible to the Brazilian readership. Euclides da Cunha, a war correspondent for the newspaper "O Estado de São Paulo," was amongst those who contributed to the state's war…

Detective fiction--with its roots primarily in Europe and the United States--was slow to catch on in Brazil, where national authors did not attempt more than small forays into the genre for most of the twentieth century. This was due in large part to the particularities of Brazilian society, in which law enforcement agencies, rife with corruption,…

By reimagining William Faulkner's 1954 visit to Brazil, Antônio Dutra's "Dias de Faulkner" (2008) establishes a creative dialogue with Faulkner's "oeuvre" while also inquiring into the author's enigmatic personality. In the process Dutra's narrative invites us to reflect on the complex and contradictory relationship between the…

To write about Brasilia in the 1960s was to write about a dual city, part symbol and part reality. This dual city grew out of an impulse to oversimplify representations of the real city in order to preserve its mythic promise of national progress. The oversimplifications derived from a national desire to showcase how Brazil had found an authentic…

Adopting the multiliteracy concept and embracing the challenge of developing meaningful and captivating classes for Portuguese as Foreign Language in Brazil, this paper proposes an approach which includes the use of different technologies to learn and teach Portuguese, the reading of graphic novel adaptations of Brazilian literature classics and…

This paper profiles representative Afro-Brazilian writers and provides a guide to English language translations and critical studies of their work. The aim is to encourage instructors to broaden the scope of current curricula in black and Latin American studies courses. Recent studies estimate that more than 40 percent of Brazil's inhabitants are…