Portuguese and Brazilian Studies (MA)

The course "Os corpos do Brasil. Figuras e metáforas do corpo na literatura brasileira" proposes an itinerary through a selection of pradigmatic texts of Brazilian literature from its origins to the contemporary.
The key idea is to read the texts through the political, symbolic and metaphorical figure of the body.
The course (60 hours) is divided into 6 units:
a)
the indigenous body: the analysis of the famous Carta do Achamento written by Pêro Vaz da Caminha in April 1500 will allow us to read the figural history of the indigenous body - with all the impudence of its adamic nakedness - to be considered as a real threshold of the colonial construction of otherness.
b)
The devoured body:
starting from the metaphor of the swallowing of the body, Brazilian Modernism and the Anthropophagic Movement are experimenting with a way to affirm an authentically Brazilian cultural and literary identity.
c)
The black body: the emergence of narrating the body of the black begins at the end of the nineteenth century with the abolition of slavery in Brazil (1888). The black identity becomes central in the literary narratives of writers of the twentieth century. The novel by Jorge Amado Jubiabá (1934) is a paradigmatic attempt at redemption, in an epic and picaresque way, of the history of the Brazilian Negro, in particular of Bahia.
d)
Female bodies, precarious bodies: in the book Quarto de despejo of Maria Carolina de Jesus, the female body, the black body, tried by work and hunger, and the set of precarious conditions of life in the favela are the engine of a writing that bursts into the public space to claim the right to exist, problematizing the Brazilian literary canon of the sixties.

e)
The body as a corpse:
announcing literary modernity in Brazil is the dead body, cadaverous of the protagonist of the novel by Machado de Assis Memórias póstumas de Braz Cubas (1881) who is granted the impossible privilege to narrate the his memories inevitably "posthumous".
f)
Human body and animal body: the tale "Meu tio o Iauaretê" by João Guimarães Rosa, masterfully stages that "perspective relativity" that contemporary anthropology recognizes in Brazilian indigenous cultures, capable of redefining the boundary between the human body and the animal body.