A Revista Criação & Crítica parte de uma provocação: pensar uma crítica cujo foco não seja a interpretação literária Somos, então, uma revista de crítica literária, sendo assim, todos os artigos, resenhas e traduções devem estar relacionados a tal universo. Com essa base, organizamos nossas publicações em dossiês temáticos. Nossa equipe é composta pela editora-chefe, Profa. Dra. Claudia Amigo Pino (Universidade de São Paulo), e pelo comitê editorial formado por Mônica Gama (Universidade Federal de Ouro Preto), Marcos Piason Natali (Universidade de São Paulo), Katerina Blasques Kaspar (Universidade de São Paulo), Leonardo Cavalcante Mendes (Universidade de São Paulo), Álvaro Faleiros (Universidade de São Paulo), Maurício Santana Dias (Universidade de São Paulo), Michel Sleiman (Universidade de São Paulo), Mário Ramos (Universidade de São Paulo) e Angélica Amâncio (Université Jean Moulin - Lyon 3).
Universidade de São Paulo. Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms: Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgment of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal. Authors can enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgment of its initial publication in this journal. Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) before and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).
Copyright (c) 2026 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
The travelogue uses the resources offered by fables, sometimes resorts to lies or welcomes daydreams. This “slightly fictitious” prose does not, however, give up on putting the world and the experience of the traveler into words. Its power of seduction is due, in particular, to its inclusion in the field of literatures of the real.
“The place I speak of has been kept with thunder”: Spatiality, navigation and runaway in the drama Anything For a Quiet Life (1621)
This article investigates Thomas Middleton and John Webster’s comedy Anything for a Quiet Life (1621) through the lens of spatial studies, arguing that spatiality is fundamental to understanding cultural dynamics in English Renaissance drama. Building on the so-called “spatial turn” in the humanities, scholars such as the French philosopher Henri Lefebvre and the Chinese-American geographer Yi-Fu Tuan have conceived of space as an active agent in the social and cultural production of a given locality. Within this framework, two recurrent tensions emerge in the play: first, urban navigation, exemplified by characters such as Young Franklin, who cross social and geographical boundaries using skills honed as a pirate at sea; and second, domestic conflict, in which households – those of the Cressinghams, Camlet, and Knavesbe – become sites of instability, reflecting on a micro scale the dynamics of mobility and the desire to escape London. By portraying the city not as a mere backdrop but as a central agent, the play dramatizes London as both a source of crisis and a space of possibility, with the stage enacting urban experiences shared by playwrights, audiences, and the city itself.
Among boiadeiros: an anthropological analysis of A Boiada by João Guimarães Rosa
This essay analyzes the travel notebook A Boiada (1952), by João Guimarães Rosa, from an anthropological perspective. It aims to understand how the notes made by the writer during the 1952 expedition through the sertão of Minas Gerais contributed to the elaboration of literary narratives grounded in ethnographic procedures. The study is based on analysis of the handwritten and typewritten material available in the Guimarães Rosa Archive (IEB/USP), as well as on a review of selected bibliography. The investigation highlights the articulation between lived experience, memory, research, and literary creation, revealing A Boiada as a tool of work and experimentation that operates between orality and writing, reality and fabulation. The study demonstrates that the travel notebook functions as a tool for listening, registering, and composion, in which Rosa gathers and reworks the knowledge of the people and landscapes he visited, integrating them into the narrative and creative fabric of his works.
Caliban in front of the mirror: the lived experience of black man as a response to colonial alienation
This work investigates how the articulation between the condition of being a foreigner and that of being a Black man contributed to the formulation of the so-called “The lived experience of the black man” [l’experiénce vécue du Noir]. This articulation is understood as a direct result of colonial alienation, a process that imposed on various dominated peoples the negation of their cultural references in favor of a hegemonic model. To support this analysis, we recurred to the thought of Martinican psychiatrist Frantz Fanon, whose experience as a foreigner in the Metropole revealed the estrangement caused by the false promises of belonging imposed by colonialism. Based on anti-colonial critique and Fanon’s writings, this study examines the same dynamic in the essay “Stranger in the Village,” included in the collection Notes of a Native Son by the African American writer James Baldwin. The aim is to highlight how the dual experience of displacement can serve as a privileged standpoint for the development of a critical and literary perspective.
Lesbians on the road: Patricia Highsmith and the road novel canon
This paper explores lesbian possibilities in the road novel genre, analyzing it from a critical perspective of the literary canon, with the goal of understanding which stories have shaped the world over time. It explores how the travel literature genre has historically consolidated itself through the male perspective on the journey. Next, the article proposes a reflection on how Patricia Highsmith's work, The Price of Salt, offers an entry point for lesbian narratives in the road novel genre and how it influenced authors of her generation. Finally, I present a cartography of lesbian narratives, Lesbian Chronotopia, as a reconfiguration of what is understood as travel and as narrating the world.
Susan Sontag and China: the professional traveler in an archaeology of conceptions
This article aims to investigate travel as an experience in three texts by Susan Sontag: the short story “Project for a trip to China,” which is part of the collection I etcetera (1978), and the essays “Questions of Travel” (1984), which is part of the book Where the Stress Falls (2005), and “Trip to Hanoi”, part of the book Style of Radical Will (2005), in order to examine how the act of traveling and narrating constitute a literary theme, experience, and exercise of otherness. Part of the reflections on travel are based on Machado and Pageaux (1988) and Chevalier and Gheerbrant (2001). To this end, we also draw on brief notions of autofiction and authorship, with texts by Lejeune (2008), Arfuch (2010), and Bakhtin (2000). By establishing connections between the two texts, we seek to highlight the relevance of travel both as an aesthetic metaphor and as a critical category that runs through Sontag's work.
De uma língua à outra: o plurilinguismo literário na cultura contemporânea - espaços literários entre línguas
Copyright (c) 2025 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Traveling, denying, writing, searching: topics for an analysis in Elvira Hernández’s Carta de Viaje
The article proposes a reading of Carta de viaje (1989), a work by Chilean poet Elvira Hernández, in which the lyrical subject travels to Sweden in search of her brother. Along this journey, oblique spaces emerge that engage with experiences of violence, traces of the military dictatorship, and the dilemmas of democratic transition, as well as historically fractured identities and the profound differences between the two countries. In a writing of inviability and invisibility, Hernández explores vertiginous and ironic poetic procedures, among other twists of language. The study seeks to introduce the figure of Elvira Hernández, to highlight how the work strains genres associated with intimacy, such as the letter and the diary, destabilizing and reinscribing them within a poetic key, and to synthesize the relation the travel establishes between body, identity, and landscape.
Ethico-Political Dimensions of Listening to Trauma in the Context of Human Displacement: Where Is It That Fosters the Here?
This article offers an ethical-political reflection on human displacement through the articulation of literary narrative and critical analysis. Drawing on the figuration of the “ruin-body” embodied in the fictional story of João, a forced migrant, the text explores how experiences of migration and refuge intertwine with aesthetic and subjective dimensions, producing metaphors that challenge borders, memories, and identities. The fictional account, grounded in elements of clinical practice with immigrants, is mobilized as a literary strategy capable of giving visibility to lives marked by precarity, trauma, and exclusion. At the same time, the essay discusses the epistemological and political implications of listening to migratory suffering, considering ruins as a form of memory and resistance. In this movement, literature and critique converge to interrogate the colonial-capitalist effects on displaced bodies, problematizing categories of humanity, belonging, and alterity. Thus, the narrative of João who is not from here calls for rethinking travel as an experience of symbolic creation, border displacement, and the production of new modes of existence.
Um clássico contemporâneo: A República Mundial das Letras, de Pascale Casanova
Traduzido por Rita Jover-Faleiros, este artigo foi originalmente publicado em Acta fabula, vol. 26, n° 7, « 25 ans d'Acta fabula. Un Cabinet de lectures » 2025, URL http://www.fabula.org/revue/document19778.php. Acesso em: 28/08/2025.
Imaginary journeys to the amazon: Quebecois juvenile adventures and the construction of images of Brazil
Adventure novels and works of fictional travel (FAVARO, 2009) set in the Amazon and aimed at young readers occupy a unique place in the construction of literary images of Brazil abroad. The Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec (BAnQ), located in Montréal, houses the largest Francophone collection in the Americas, including the Espace Jeunes, dedicated to children up to 13 years old. Among the approximately 180 works in this space that address Brazil, ecological narratives stand out. This article examines three of them: Une hirondelle en Amazonie (2007) by Lisandra Lannes; Mathis au Brésil (2014) by Michel Prenovost; and Un voyage incroyable en Amazonie (2022) by Berthier Pearson. The research draws on the NatCult matrix (GOGA et al., 2018), which examines cultural representations of nature, imagology theory (VAN DOORSLAER, 2022; LEERSSEN, 2016; PAGEAUX, 2007), and the concept of environmental children’s literature (MASSEY; BRADFORD, 2011), which emphasizes the role of fiction in the ethical and ecological education of young readers. In dialogue with ecocriticism (GLOTFELTY, 1996; HEISE, 1997), it investigates how these narratives construct, through travel, images of the Amazon and Brazil in the Francophone imagination, revealing strategies for ecological awareness and the formation of ecocitizens.
Brazil as hypo and hypertext: a reading of Brazil's images in Woodes Rogers (1732), Daniel Defoe (1719) and Coetzee (1987).
This article investigates how the representation of Brazil in A Cruising Voyage Round the World (1928), by Woodes Rogers, reverberates through the English Language literary tradition, influencing Robinson Crusoe (1920), by Daniel Defoe, and later being re-signified in Foe (1987), by J.M. Coetzee. The analysis draws on Julia Kristeva’s (2005) concept of intertextuality, Mikhail Bakhtin’s dialogism (1981), and Gérard Genette’s notions of hypertext and hypotext (2010), aiming to understand how these works construct, perpetuate, and challenge colonial representations of Brazil. While Robinson Crusoe recovers the exploratory and imperialist perspective found in Rogers’s travel narrative, Foe subverts this tradition by highlighting silenced voices and questioning the colonial discourse. Thus, this study proposes the existence of a symbolic intertextual network that connects these texts and reveals how travel writing and fiction shape cultural representations over time.
The serpent tongue of Eliane Marques: pretugués as the core of a border literature in dialogue with portuñol
This article explores hybrid linguistic forms as a poetic and aesthetic device in Louças de família (2023), a novel by Brazilian writer Eliane Marques. Focusing on the author’s engagement with Portuñol and Pretuguese, the study reflects on how these hybrid forms of language can be understood as a "serpent tongue," in the terms proposed by Chicana intellectual Gloria Anzaldúa. Methodologically, the article analyzes excerpts from the novel in which Spanish and Portuguese blend together and elements that align with Lélia Gonzalez’s notion of Pretuguese emerge. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach, the discussion draws on references from linguistics, comparative literature, and feminist criticism. The article concludes that Louças de família is not only set in a geographic borderland but also translates this liminality into its very use of language.
São Paulo from the perspective of menotti del picchia and José Osório de Oliveira in the early 1940s: tourism and travel memories
This study comparatively analyses two articles by the Portuguese essayist José Osório de Oliveira and one by the Brazilian writer Menotti Del Picchia about the city of São Paulo, published in tourist and cultural magazines edited by the National Propaganda Secretariat (SPN) and the Press and Propaganda Department (DIP) between 1941 and 1945. The aim is to understand how the authors of these articles positioned themselves in relation to the ideological principles of the Salazar and Vargas regimes, such as nationalism, progress and the valorisation of cultural heritage. Tourism and international exchanges were used as a means of publicising these principles.
The Traveling Writer and The Paths of Writing: Ignácio de Loyola Brandão and the craft of ideas
This unpublished interview with Ignácio de Loyola Brandão, conducted by Wagner Merije, traces the journey of one of the most significant contemporary Brazilian authors, whose work moves between journalism, literature, and travel writing. The author recalls his formative years in Araraquara, his early steps in journalism, and the shaping of a literary voice defined by ethical and aesthetic engagement. In his responses, Ignácio de Loyola Brandão highlights literature’s critical function, his visceral relationship with writing, and the role of fiction in shaping social consciousness. The interview offers reflections on the craft of writing, the creative process, the influence of cinema, and the political dimension of literature, revealing the complexity of a thought deeply attuned to the transformations of Brazil and the wider world. Throughout the conversation, the figure of the “travelling writer” emerges—one who turns errancy into literary material and lived experience into critical clarity. This interview contributes to expanding studies in contemporary literature, memory, engagement, and self-writing.
Modernismo translíngue: Sérgio Milliet, francógrafo brasileiro
Este artigo examina a produção em francês do poeta modernista Sérgio Milliet, como ela se desenvolveu entre 1917 e 1923. O objetivo é entender como e por que o escritor brasileiro optou por escrever na língua de Cendrars, antes de retornar à sua língua nativa quando voltou ao Brasil. Traduzido por Daniel Padilha Pacheco da Costa, este artigo retoma um capítulo e elementos do livro Diamétralement modernes. Poètes francophones d’Amérique latine (Sermier, 2025).
Writing Between Languages: Self-Translation as a Critical Gesture in Nancy Huston
This article examines self-translation as a critical gesture in Nancy Huston, especially from the essays, Nord Perdu (1999) / Losing North (2002). Articulating Translation Studies, Philosophy of Language and Literary Criticism, this article proposes that self-translation, far from being a mere transposition between languages, is a poetic principle, as in Samuel Beckett, as well as a political gesture, in Nancy Huston, capable of destabilizing linguistic hierarchies and revealing identity tensions. The analysis shows how the Anglophone Canadian writer, by writing directly in French and self-translating her books into English, performs the theoretical losing north that she describes. Self-translation thus becomes a constitutive part of the work's internal textual functioning, questioning fixed notions of original and translation. By emphasizing the creative, and not just technical, dimension of self-translation, the aim is to broaden the debate on literary plurilingualism, highlighting its potential to rethink disciplinary boundaries and the limits of translation. Finally, the perspective of losing north is the starting point for discussing self-translation in its political dimension, without obscuring its inherent contradictions.
“Tú no eres dominicano”: negociaciones de lenguaje y traducción en el universo de Junot Díaz
This paper seeks to analyze the plurilingualism applied in the work of Dominican Junot Díaz (2007), both from the original novel and from the Spanish translation. Thus, we focus on two elements: a) the code-switching present in the work; and b) the strategies used by translator Achy Obejas, whose translation, of a “foreignizing” nature, is configured as a subversive act against the hegemony of English. Both fronts of entry are strongly linked to the notion of “literatures without a fixed abode”, coined by the German theorist Ottmar Ette (2018), which vindicates movement in the face of attempts to fix literature in a specific place. Literatures without a fixed abode, thus, reflect the hybrid nature of identities, which, in the field of literature, is reinforced by the presence of authors who play with languages ​​and borders, as is the case with Junot Díaz.
Translating Débarcadères (1922) by Jules Supervielle into Portuguese: problems, solutions and horizons
Jules Supervielle (Montevideo, 1884 – Paris, 1960), a French-Uruguayan writer, published most of his work in the first half of the 20th century. He lived moving between South America and Europe, recording in his books this journey from north to south, along with other dichotomies. The poems of Débarcadères (1922) are an example of this, portraying multicultural landscapes and multilingual structures. They also mark a turning point in his work, blending the influence of modern aesthetics with classical paradigms that had previously characterized his writing. In this article, we report on the ongoing translation of Débarcadères into Portuguese, a project that stems from our doctoral dissertation. We discuss, in particular, three challenges and their provisional solutions: the use of inversion as a rhetorical device; the Spanish alexandrine; and the word that gives the collection its title.
Amerindian repertoires and translingual poetics in Brazil: translation, creation, and their glottopolitical inflections
In recent years, there has been a growing reflection on the glottopolitical dimensions of cultural practices on the agenda of Latin American Studies. This movement is in line with the questioning of the monolingual paradigm in current literature, as well as emphasizing the political role of the presence of indigenous languages and cosmologies on the contemporary cultural scene. Based on the assumption that literature and translation function as important agents of language policies, I propose the conceptual elaboration of a literary glottopolitical perspective, in order to debate forms of silencing of plurilingualism and translingualism in the Brazilian literary field, and on the other, to make visible the critical performativity that the zones of contact/friction between multiple language-cultures have brought to the poetic discourse. Therefore, I aim to discuss the correlations and tensions between creation and translation, provoked by the gestures of aesthetic appropiation of Amerindian linguistic and poetic repertoires, developed through procedures like quotation, selecting/montage and translation/self-translation by current indigenous and non indigenous authors. To this end, I analyze poems by Graça Graúna and Márcia Wayna Kambeba, as well as transcreations of Guarani Mbya repertoire by poet-translators Douglas Diegues and Josely Vianna Baptista.
The poetics of coolitude as a crossing and horizon of awareness and resistance in déwé gorodé’s lyrics: a translingual francophone space
Studies on translingual poetics bring to light the names of canonical authors of different nationalities. Focusing on French-language writers, we observe that they often live between languages, due to the historical linguistic situation related to territorial conquests or colonization, which often resulted in linguistic imposition. Thus, literary creation emerges in the various French-speaking geographical spaces around the world, within a peculiar context shaped by the diversity of the language itself. How, then, does translingual writing manifest itself as a form of resistance among "Francophone" writers? This paper aims to discuss how the literary production of so-called "Francophone" authors arises in a space of resistance against the historical imposition of the French language. From a theoretical perspective, De Balsi (2024) anchors the discussions on translingual Francophonie, while Torabully (1992) explores the poetics of coolitude in maritime spaces. Following this, I provide an overview of translingual production in the Francophone world, highlighting the coexistence of multiple languages alongside French. Finally, I focus on the lyrical works of Francophone women poets from the Pacific, particularly the Kanak poet Déwé Gorodé, whose poetics of coolitude serves as the foundation for a lyrical expression of cultural resistance through language.
A Possible Theatrical Language: A Study on Foreignness in Contemporary Brazilian Playwriting
This article offers a reflection on the meaning effects produced by the use of foreign languages in contemporary playwriting, taking as a starting point Henri Meschonnic’s notion of rhythm, which displaces language beyond signification and code. In dialogue with Marion Chénetier-Alev, who identifies the use of other languages as a critical and political tool in the European stage context, the text turns to the work of Brazilian playwrights who mobilize foreignness as a poetic operation. The focus then shifts to the contemporary Brazilian stage, observing experiences in which the foreign—through language, through rhythm—crosses the text. These practices challenge the hegemony of linguistic norms and activate Brazilian Portuguese as a sensitive matter, embedded in histories, violence, and translation. Playwriting is thus conceived as an operation that constructs new meanings in the passage between languages, establishing a zone of contagion where language no longer recognizes itself in a stabilized form. The article ultimately proposes the idea of a theatrical language—unstable, rhythmic, continuous, ephemeral—that invents and reconfigures the relations between language, body, and world.
The Translator Translated: foreign Versions of Haroldo de Campos’ Transcreation Theory
Haroldo de Campos’ transcreation theory and practice have received significant attention in Brazil and abroad over the past decades. His incorporation of foreign poets into the Brazilian literary system via translation has been understood through the metaphor of “anthropophagy” used by Haroldo de Campos himself. However, not much energy has been put into understanding the extensive network of international translation agents he set forth to promote foreign versions of his own poems and essays. Learning from his American master, Ezra Pound, to be an “entrepreneur of the arts”, Haroldo de Campos tried to publicise foreign versions of his poems and essays in different languages, as evidenced by his continued effort to publish them in international journals and books. Based on a survey of foreign versions in six different languages (Spanish, English, French, German, Italian, and Polish) of his 20 most significant essays on his transcreation theory, we seek to understand the extent of its dissemination abroad.
Unprofitable sailor: on Héctor Bianciotti's “La barque sur le Neckar”
This article proposes a reading of Hector Bianciotti's short story "Le barque sur le Neckar" (1982), considering the Argentine author´'s transition from Spanish (the language of his birth country) to French. To this goal, reference is made to his early works and to the way in wich the author has argued for his inclusion in the French language. It analyzes the author´' s reception discourses at the French Academy of Literature, and invokes the theoretical concepts of fetishism (BHabba, 2005), and mother tonge (Melman, 1992), among others.
Generalized hyperbolitis (or notes against exophony)
The text offered for reading, to whom it may concern, is a theoretical debate around the notion that translation is an exercise in displacement from one language to another. In order to stress this point, arguments by Tawada Yōko around exophony (speaking and writing in the language of the other, minimally presupposing bilingualism) and by Jacques Derrida around the monolingualism of the Other (a minimally aporetic condition that reveals colonial violence) are reread. This post-colonial and deconstructive re-reading aims to criticize the applicability of the notion of exophony to Tawada's work, highlighting the reinforcement of colonial erasure as a condition for the construction of the figure of a native who chooses either to remain monolingual or to venture into learning the language of the other. The end of the text tries to suggest that this exercise is both the translation of a desire and the act of translation itself, present not only in plurilingualism, but also in monolingualism.
Multiculturalism and cosmopolitan expressions in Mínimos, múltiplos, comuns, by João Gilberto Noll
This paper aims to investigate four literary narratives from João Gilberto Noll's Minimos, múltiplos, comuns (2003), which allow for an encounter with otherness by proposing different cultural points of view. To this end, the concept of literature as a resource that allows contact with diverse logics is mobilized. The aim here is to revisit the concept of cosmopolitanism and investigate cosmopolitan expressions and the coexistence of cultural multilogies in four short stories, based on the narratives of borderline characters, in which there is a coexistence between cultures and different ways of life. It is clear that the narratives analyzed foster cross-cultural encounters and serve to broaden reading horizons and the practice of specific literary knowledge (knowing how to live, survive and coexist), which contributes to the collective establishment of the notion of the common good.
La génétique des textes à la génétique des traductions: le(s) chaînon(s) manquant(s)
When developed in France in the 1970s, the object of genetic criticism was to study a literary work’s creative process. Although it has since opened up to other, non-textual corpora that have renewed the discipline’s methodological and theoretical boundaries, the elaboration of texts remains at the heart of its analyses. Research on translated texts also contributes to this. Studies on the creative process of translators emerged around the same time in different places (Brazil, Italy, France...). As such, they respond both to the need to explore the elaboration of a translation and the epistolary between translator and author and to interrogate the impact of these interactions on the translated text. They also question all the paratextual issues that accompany the output of a translation. This article focuses on the evolution from genetic criticism of literary texts to genetic criticism of translations. It shows that, in France, genetic studies on translations have benefited from exchanges, often informal, with Brazilian researchers. They have also been strongly inspired by research into literary plurilingualism, which has helped to push back the frontiers of genetic criticism by offering researchers new corpora and new theoretical and methodological challenges. Indeed, the three creative modalities –writing between languages, self-translation and translation (in particular, collaborative translation)– are very closely interconnected and need to be understood as a complex creative and documentary whole.
Among Languages: Translation and Literatures of the South
This article proposes that the translation violence of the colonising process – in terms of the confrontation between oral languages and ones with written grammars – coupled with the institutionalisation of a given language as the national one, contains both a memory of the silencing of indigenous languages and cultures, and of transculturation (ORTIZ). The latter, in turn, manifests itself, among other ways, through books that in different ways deal with the relationship between the West and descendants of the first-nation peoples of South America (especially in Circum-Roraima, the triple-border region between Brazil, Venezuela and Guyana) and those of African descent (particularly in discussions about the use of the coloniser’s language or the indigenous languages by writers from former colonies).
Languages and translations in confrontation