The journal Literatura e Sociedade, linked to the Department of Literary Theory and Comparative Literature, of the School of Philosophy, Literature and Human Sciences of the University of São Paulo, since its first issue, published in 1996, has focused on promoting, welcoming and publishing essays, lectures, testimonials, translations, reviews and interviews on fundamental issues of the literary phenomenon. The scope covers the theory of genres, the interface between literature and society, comparative literature, the relations between literature and other arts and areas of knowledge, the history of literature, great authors and great works, the methods and practices of literary criticism. The submissions of articles by PhD researchers, from Brazil and abroad, linked to the area of Literary Theory and Comparative Literature or related areas, are welcomed in continuous flow. The evaluation is done by peers indicated by the Editorial Committee. Since 2014, the journal's periodicity became semiannual.
Universidade de São Paulo. Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas
Alfredo Bosi: Recortes de jornal. Transcrições
Transcrições feitas por Alfredo Bosi
Copyright (c) 2025 Alfredo Bosi https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Um mundo tomado pela escrita: a carta (como fantasma) no cinema
Resenha do texto Desconhecido na morada: carta no cinema, de Clara Rowland.
Desconhecido na morada: a carta no cinema
Copyright (c) 2025 Marcos Antonio de Moraes, Giovani T. Kurz https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
O preparo de edições críticas e a presença desafiadora das novas tecnologias: a organização de correspondência em formato digital e algumas implicações para a pesquisa e o ensino no Brasil de hoje
This article aims to reflect on specific aspects related to the preparation of modern critical editions in an era of accelerated technological advancement. More specifically, it seeks to address issues concerning the preparation of digital critical editions based on archival documents from writers, particularly epistolography, by exploring how the confluence of philological studies and other specific disciplines (which consider the multiple status of texts in archives) can contribute to achieving fruitful editorial results. Some key points will touch upon the opportunities opened by increasing computerization and contemporary demands in education and research in Brazil. The article will discuss possibilities arising from the work of organizing the correspondence of Gilberto Freyre (1900-1987), one of the most widely published Brazilian essayists in Brazil and abroad, and José Lins do Rego (1901-1957), a prominent figure in 20th-century Brazilian novel writing. Finally, it will attempt to observe to what extent digital editions of epistolary texts, with philological rigor and extensive critical apparatus, are not only viable from an academic and pedagogical standpoint but also culturally relevant. Indeed, it is argued that they can, furthermore, offer a more complex reading of Modernism and the relationships between literature and culture in 20th-century Brazil.
Reflections on editorial specificities in the face of technological advancement
The organization of modern writers' correspondence and its challenges
The epistolography of Gilberto Freyre (1900-1987)
The epistolography of José Lins do Rego (1901-1957)
Copyright (c) 2025 Silvana Moreli Vicente Dias https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Do Barroco ao Neobarroco com Jean-Claude Bernardet
Transcrição da entrevista com Jean-Claude Bernardet.
Copyright (c) 2025 Marcos Antonio de Moraes https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
True to his fragmentary method, Adorno does not presente a systematic critique of progress in his writings. He did, however, outline an admirable attempt at a dialectical problematization of the notion of progress, beyond bourgeois myths and reactionary nostalgia.
fragmentary method, dialectical problematization
Copyright (c) 2025 Michael Löwy, Eleni Varikas https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Cultura popular e religiosidade: Mário de Andrade e a cultura do boi no Brasil
The publication of an article by Mário de Andrade in December 1938, evoking the role of Saint Francis of Assisi and the “feeling for nature,” is discussed based on an analysis of his religious background and the possibility of intersection between the writing of the article and his dedication to preparing the Philosophy and History of Art course, on the one hand, and the study of ox culture, on the other. This is because the article “O irmão boi” both discusses the works of three authors who wrote about the influence of the “poor man of Assisi” on Renaissance art, and evokes the importance of ox worship in popular culture.
Copyright (c) 2025 Flávia Camargo Toni, Rosângela Francischini https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Esta é uma resenha crítica, descritiva e pormenorizada de No soy un robot, livro de ensaios do escritor mexicano Juan Villoro, publicado em 2024, cujo objetivo principal é oferecer perspectivas atuais, debates e provocações sobre a cultura da letra na sociedade digital. Todos os questionamentos do autor afetam a relação proposta pelo título desta revista: Literatura e Sociedade. Como, hoje, a leitura, e em especial, a leitura de textos literários, poderia nos resgatar dos problemas produzidos pelo mau uso da tecnologia? Como nos alertaria a respeito de seus riscos e excessos?
Copyright (c) 2025 Livia Grotto https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Tras las impresiones de Mário de Andrade y Ermano Stradelli: resonancias espectrales
This article focuses on the resonances between the modernist writer Mario de Andrade and the proto-ethnologist Ermanno Stradelli, based on the discovery of a reading note by Mario de Andrade in the IEB-USP archive that reveals a phantom link between the two, which we conceptualize as assombração or enchantment, relating to their travels through the Amazon, from which various literary and photographic works emerged.
Copyright (c) 2025 María Florencia Donadi https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Augusto Boal, the best known and studied Brazilian theater man all around the world, inherits and develops the agitprop theater tradition both in terms of dramaturgy and as a director, as well as in the field of politics properly. This essay tries to identify the most visible links between his works and the tradition of agitprop theater.
Copyright (c) 2025 Iná Camargo Costa https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
O tempo-espaço tardo-sessentista n'O anjo nasceu de Bressane
This article is an attempt at formal analysis as immanent criticism, a kind of close reading describing and commenting on Júlio Bressane's film O anjo nasceu (The Angel Was Born, 1969) as an internal rupture within Cinema Novo, operating mainly on a formal level. Instead of the expressive mobility of “a camera in hand and an idea in mind” and the narrative dynamism associated with mobility around popular characters or their representatives — such as in Glauber Rocha's Terra em Transe (1967) and so many other Cinema Novo works — the film constructs a rigid, frontal, and orthogonal visual space, as if viewed from infinity.
Copyright (c) 2025 Rubens Machado Júnior https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Gestos simbólicos de exposições anacrônicas: o sonho do poeta e a catástrofe
This essay is a Benjaminian reading of two different anachronic exhibitions in time-space where an unfamiliar look becomes a symbolic gesture: in 1931, Cícero Dias’ panel offers resistance against the modernist progressive trend of all of the other artists, while turning back to a provincial Northeast, in order to save some childhood memories which are, in turn, present. In 1944, the unfamiliarity of the Brazilian modernist artists exhibit in London is equivalent to the one in 1931. It receives an unfamiliar reception by the British, who had no knowledge of Brazialian art. Then the act of turning around acquires meaning and also shows a critical awakening in art, through the interruptions of the historical continuum.
Brazilian exhibits in 1931 and in 1944 (London)
Copyright (c) 2025 Ana Luiza Andrade https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
After the dominance of art as paradigm of aesthetic values, contemporaneity has recognized itself in a plurality of practices where even the non-aesthetic is thought as aesthetic. Which is the formation of an artist under such circumstances? We will analyze the case of Teresa Nazar.
Copyright (c) 2025 Raul Antelo https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Variações dialéticas sobre o Concerto Barroco de Alejo Carpentier
This essay aims to analyze Alejo Carpentier’s novel Concierto Barroco (1974) as a modernist experiment in which the Baroque functions simultaneously as an aesthetic form and as a historical problem specific to Latin America. The journey of the Mexican merchant and his servant Filomeno to the Venetian carnival reinscribes the Conquest of Mexico within the European economy of spectacle, where trauma is converted into an operatic plot neutralized by the conventional demand for the lieto fine. Giusti’s libretto for Vivaldi’s opera Motezuma is read as a symptom of the contradictions between the representation of historical violence and the — likewise historical — conventions governing artistic representations of history. The essay also shows how the novel juxtaposes stage and audience, ironizes the mechanisms of verisimilitude, suspends chronological temporality, and turns the “false” cry into a trigger of historical consciousness, displacing — surrealistically — the meaning of identities and representations. Finally, it returns to the nexus of opera, history, and power by comparing other operatic versions of the conquest (Graun, Spontini, Rihm) and foregrounding Carpentier’s original gesture: the introduction of an American subject who observes Europe as it represents him.
Copyright (c) 2025 Jorge de Almeida https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
This essay examines how the automobile reshapes urban experience and, consequently, the poet’s gaze in modern and contemporary literature. Arguing that the flâneur of early modernity gives way to the accelerated and fractured pedestrian of the metropolis, the text analyzes three poems — by José Paulo Paes, Sebastião Uchoa Leite, and Ana Cristina Cesar — alongside Adoniran Barbosa’s song “Iracema.” The study traces the shift of the car from an emblem of distinction and progress to a banalized, even oppressive, component of everyday life, one that transforms both perception and subjectivity. In the selected works, the automobile becomes a metaphor for paralysis and dissolution, an agent of shock and fragmentation, or a sign of temporal urgency and instability. The essay argues that contemporary poetry, by capturing fleeting scenes of movement and crossing, stages the tension between lyricism and reflection, between subjective experience and the urban environment. Within the rapid flow of traffic — where encounters are brief and collisions replace epiphanic moments — the poetic gaze resists metropolitan speed and recovers momentary flashes of consciousness.
Copyright (c) 2025 Viviana Bosi https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Minha glória literária: memória da infância e formação do escritor em Rubem Braga e Manuel Bandeira
Genre that established itself with peculiar caracteristics in Brazil, the “chronicle” establishes links with its original publishing vehicle, the newspaper, but also diferences that bring it closer to the literary. As na exemple is analized in Rubem Braga’s “Minha glória literária” — Brazilian writer that devoted himself uniquely to the newspaper chronicle —, the theme of childhood memories, which at first sight rules against the instant and transitory nature of the genre, but Braga approaches it under the influence of Manuel Bandeira’s poetry. At his turn, the poet from Pernambuco also uses his paper column to remember his first steps into literature, in “Confidências a Edmundo Lys”.
Copyright (c) 2025 Sylvia Tamie Anan https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
The literary chronicle of the young Rubem Braga opens unexplored angles in the Brazilian intellectual experience. It sheds new light both on the modern development of the genre and on the relations between culture and politics in the 1930s. This is what we seek to demonstrate by analyzing the discursive forms experimented in “Engraxates de São Paulo”, written in 1935 and never published in book.
Copyright (c) 2025 Arthur Vonk https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Literatura e Psicanálise: Amor (e ódio) em Emma Zunz
“Emma Zunz” is a short story in the book El Aleph by Jorge Luis Borges (1949) and is analyzed here from the perspective of the three passions according to the theory of Lacan: love, hate and ignorance. The central character, Emma, experiences such passions in her attempt to avenge her father's death.These passions constitute the dynamic that sustains her actions, her dissimulations and the ambivalence of the narrative composition itself.
Copyright (c) 2025 Cleusa Rios Passos https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Budapeste de Chico Buarque: poética e miséria da literatura
Focusing Chico Buarque’s Budapeste, this reading seeks to discuss different issues involving literary production and the commodification of literature, implying relationships between art and artistic counterfeiting.
Copyright (c) 2025 Maria Augusta Fonseca https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
This proposal is an analysis of the frame narrative of The 1001 Nights, in which Scheherazade not only escapes the death sentence imposed by the Sultan but also "cures" him of his pathological and murderous rage against women by telling him stories. It highlights the power of "organizing experience," as Antonio Candido would say, exercised by the literary word, with reflections on the "efficacious word" that range from shamanistic practices to Psychoanalysis, with which a parallel is established. The focus here is on the archaic and magical power of the word which, as in faith healing, religion, and Psychoanalysis, possesses the strength to transform inner realities. For this reason, the work of Lévi-Strauss is referenced, addressing the shamanistic practices of songs and narratives among the Cuna Indians of Panama, as well as the ideas of Walter Benjamin in his text "To narrate and to heal"; and, looking further back, it alludes to Plato who, in The Republic, attributes to the myths told to children the capacity to "shape souls."Here, we find narrative restored to its full and primordial meaning as a vehicle for human experience.
Copyright (c) 2025 Adelia Bezerra de Meneses https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Il Comunista de Guido Morselli e a Crise das Utopias
This article examines Il comunista (1964) by Guido Morselli, discussing how parliamentary routine functions as a laboratory for the erosion of meaning. The focus falls on Walter Ferranini, who, detached from the debate, transforms the observation of another parliamentarian into a trigger for introspective drift and growing skepticism regarding party discipline and the representative capacity of institutions. I argue (“signifying nothing”), similar to the monologuing voice of Dissipatio H.G., but that the protagonist’s trajectory culminates in na experience of disappearance of meaning produced here by specific historical and political conditions. By contrasting the historicized crisis of Il comunista with the allegorical evacuation of Dissipatio, the article seeks to highlight two Morsellian modalities of estrangement. The novel thus reconfigures political realism by converting banal gestures into signs of institutional mediation failure.
Copyright (c) 2025 Maurício Santana Dias https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Editorial por Anderson Gonçalves da Silva, Maria Augusta Fonseca e Samuel Titan Jr.
Copyright (c) 2025 Anderson Gonçalves da Silva, Maria Augusta Fonseca, Samuel de Vasconcelos Titan Júnior https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Bibliografia de Roberto Schwarz, levantamento contou com contribuições de Maurício Reimberg.
Copyright (c) 2025 Edu Teruki Otsuka https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
No seminário “USP 90 anos: Antonio Candido”, ocorrido em outubro de 2024, no departamento de Letras da FFLCH-USP, Paulo Arantes, falando sobre o livro Formação da literatura brasileira (1959), contou ter percebido com espanto que, entre colegas e mestres no histórico prédio da rua Maria Antonia, onde funcionava a Faculdade de Filosofia, Ciências e Letras da USP, com exceção de duas ou três pessoas, o célebre livro não fora lido completamente tanto quanto faria supor a celeuma e os vários equívocos que causou (o mais famoso deles e síntese das discussões de uma década antes ficou sendo o livro O sequestro do barroco, de Haroldo de Campos, de 1989).
Copyright (c) 2025 Denilson Soares Cordeiro, Roberto Schwarz https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Nesta seção transcrevemos alguns poemas e contos de Roberto Schwarz, originalmente publicados no suplemento “Folhetim”, da Folha de S. Paulo, e na revista Almanaque, entre 1978 e 1985. Os textos são todos posteriores à publicação de Corações veteranos (1974), livro que marca a produção mais característica do autor no terreno da criação literária, ao lado das peças A lata de lixo da história (1977) e Rainha Lira (2022).
Copyright (c) 2025 Roberto Schwarz https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Conversa com Roberto Schwarz sobre Rainha Lira
Entrevista realizada no dia 14 de março de 2025, na residência do autor, em São Paulo (SP).
Copyright (c) 2025 Maurício Reimberg https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Arte e política: aspectos da prosa ficcional de Roberto Schwarz
Based on a fictional narrative by Roberto Schwarz, the essay aims to present and discuss the author's reflections and the author's literary productions on art and politics throughout the 1960s and 1990s.
critical and fictional production by Roberto Schwarz
Copyright (c) 2025 Ivone Daré Rabello https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
O sequestro da poesia de Roberto Schwarz
Roberto Schwarz is primarily recognized as a literary critic. However, his books and essays are frequently cited in articles, dissertations, theses, and books across various fields, including history, philosophy, education, communication, anthropology, sociology, and political science. Given this breadth, he stands among the most-cited authors in the Portuguese language. His two poetry books, however, have largely gone unnoticed, even among his acknowledged disciples. This article presents an account of the reception of Pássaro na gaveta and Corações veteranos.
Copyright (c) 2025 Ricardo Musse https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Roberto Schwarz em verso e prosa: confluências entre Corações Veteranos e “As ideias fora do lugar"
This text examines the interrelation between poetic production and essay writing in the work of Roberto Schwarz during the 1970s. More specifically, it focuses on the confluences between the poems in the book Corações veteranos(1974) — as well as those Schwarz published in the anthology 26 poetas hoje(1976) —and the essay “Misplaced Ideas” (first published in 1973 in the journal Estudos Cebrap, and later in the 1977 book To the Victor, the Potatoes). In a dynamic of mutual tensions and illuminations, poetry and essay establish an original field of forces, whose essayistic result became a landmark in Brazilian culture, while the poetic aspect remained in the background. Considered together, they simultaneously shed light on Schwarz’s aesthetic tour de force and his contradictory stance toward one of his main literary sources, Brazilian modernism.
Copyright (c) 2025 Leandro Pasini https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Pobres heroínas de nossa gente: Macunaíma, mercadoria, dinheiro
This essay seeks to characterize the ways in which Mario de Andrade's book Macunaíma (1928) captures, in the implication between the archaic and the modern, the presence of money and the fetish of merchandise in the uneven and combined modernization of Brazil. In doing so, it aims to specify the "extraordinary final sadness" of this book as that of a "Brazilian novel", based on assumptions formulated by Roberto Schwarz.
Copyright (c) 2025 Ana Paula Pacheco https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
João Gilberto e o terreiro do samba (comentário à margem de alguns ensaios de Roberto Schwarz)
In the light of formulations by Roberto analyzes and interprets the form of two recordings made by João Gilberto in 1959 — “A felicidade” (Antonio Carlos Jobim/ Schwarz in five critical texts, the essay Vinicius de Moraes) and “O nosso amor” (Antonio Carlos Jobim/ Vinicius de Moraes). The recordings basically juxtapose João Gilberto's lyrical expression in an intimate setting with the collective manifestation in aterreiro do samba, explaining the distance between the two social places and leveling them out.In this sense, while João’s work was noted for controlling contradictions in such a way that conflicts did not emerge, the two recordings project a mode of coexistence in which the contrasts are ostentatious.
Copyright (c) 2025 Walter Garcia https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0