Magma
type: channel
description: Magma Revista is a publication of the Department of Literary Theory and Comparative Literature of the Faculty of Philosophy, Letters and Human Sciences of the University of São Paulo. Currently, the magazine, which was initially created with the objective of publicizing the production of the department's student body, accepts work from active graduate students, and researchers with a title of up to five years for the article sections. For the creation, translation and review sections, we received works from undergraduate research students, graduate students and qualified researchers, without restrictions.
publisher: Universidade de São Paulo. Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas
language: en
publication name: Magma
issn: 0104-6330
copyright: Autores que publicam nesta revista concordam com os seguintes termos: Autores mantém os direitos autorais e concedem à revista o direito de primeira publicação, com o trabalho simultaneamente licenciado sob a Licença Creative Commons Attribution CC-BY-NC-ND que permite o compartilhamento do trabalho com reconhecimento da autoria e publicação inicial nesta revista. Autores têm autorização para assumir contratos adicionais separadamente, para distribuição não-exclusiva da versão do trabalho publicada nesta revista (ex.: publicar em repositório institucional ou como capítulo de livro), com reconhecimento de autoria e publicação inicial nesta revista. Autores têm permissão e são estimulados a publicar e distribuir seu trabalho online (ex.: em repositórios institucionais ou na sua página pessoal) a qualquer ponto antes ou durante o processo editorial, já que isso pode gerar alterações produtivas, bem como aumentar o impacto e a citação do trabalho publicado (Veja O Efeito do Acesso Livre).
items: Editorial
items: Flashes on the Pulvéreos Series
items: Antonio Candido and the practice of fantasy in our times
items: Three Poems from W. B. Yeats’s Last Poems (1939): “The Man and the Echo,” “The Circus Animals’ Desertion,” and “Politics”
items: transparências: imagining futures so that there can be a future
items: Verbal and nonverbal art in 1930: the partnership between Arnaldo Tabayá and Cornélio Penna
items: The testimonial essence of slavery's remnants in Lobivar Matos' poetry
items: Poetics of (dis)encounter in "O livro das semelhanças"
items: European Modernism in Tomasi di Lampedusa’s Literary Lessons: From criticism of Sicilian backwardness to dialogue with tradition
items: A blood debt: slavery, gendered violence, and the afterlife of slavery in Kindred, by Octavia E. Butler
items: Ekphrasis and/in poetry: notes on the contemporary debate
items: The art of seeing, or the impossible art of unseeing
items: The Flâneur's Ruins: From Bourgeois Idleness to the Sandwich-Man
items: A critic's preferences. On some assumptions from Leo Spitzer's method.
items: Making literature in a collective and eccentric way in the poem Paris não tem centro
items: Jorge Luis Borges and the second-hand narrators of El informe de Brodie (1970)
items: "It is a mute photograph. This book is a silence": considerations on incommunicability in A hora da estrela
items: A Very Brief Overview of Surrealism in Brazil, by Mário de Andrade
items: Balzac and the Book of Revelation
items: The yeses of Molly Bloom and Mrs. Ramsay
items: Firing into the air: Notes on the motivation for action in Hedda Gabler (1890)
items: A blooming stone in regionalism: reading "O sertanejo falando", by João Cabral de Melo Neto
items: The vertigo of falling: notes on a singular narrator
items: Vinte vezes Magma
items: Presence, Meaning, and Literary Criticism: An Interview with Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht
items: The sinister glissando of the years: time and transcience in Carson McCullers’ short fiction
items: Paul Celan's poetry and “On truth and lies in a nonmoral sense” by Nietzsche: approaches
items: The Supernatural in Fiction
items: The dramatic monologue in Percy B. Shelley: Prometheus between tyranny and freedom

Editorial
type: item
subject: Editorial
  topic: section
subject: Editorial
  topic: keywords
creator: Leonardo Leal
creator: Iago Lago Hamann
creator: Luis Felipe Ferrari
creator: Maria Elisa Pagan
creator: Marina Soares Nogara
creator: Raquel Abuin Siphone
creator: Samara Fernanda Buoso
creator: Zeno Queiroz
rights: Copyright (c) 2025 Iago Lago Hamann, Leonardo Leal, Luis Felipe Ferrari, Maria Elisa Pagan, Marina Soares Nogara, Raquel Abuin Siphone, Samara Fernanda Buoso, Zeno Queiroz https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
date: 2025-11-08
publication date: 2025-11-08
starting page: 10
ending page: 15
doi: 10.11606/issn.2448-1769.mag.2025.242470

Flashes on the Pulvéreos Series
type: item
description: The essay Flashes on the Pulvéreos Series presents the development process and conceptual issues related to the Pulvéreos painting series. Initiated in 2023, it is currently composed of thirteen works executed on modular plaster panels. The series originates from the observation of images of empty apartments found on real estate websites, translating these visualities into paintings dominated by white and light gray tones. Throughout the text, the artist discusses references, describes processes and techniques used, and proposes possible interpretative keys for understanding the series.
subject: Dossiê
  topic: section
subject: Contemporary art
  topic: keywords
subject: Artistic Process
  topic: keywords
subject: Painting
  topic: keywords
subject: Non-traditional Supports
  topic: keywords
subject: Monochromatic Painting
  topic: keywords
creator: Isabela Vatavuk
rights: Copyright (c) 2025 Isabela Vatavuk https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
date: 2025-11-08
publication date: 2025-11-08
starting page: 58
ending page: 72
doi: 10.11606/issn.2448-1769.mag.2025.242078

Antonio Candido and the practice of fantasy in our times
type: item
description: Proceeding from transcriptions and quotations from three lectures given by Antonio Candido in the late 1980s, the essay tries to expound the critic’s notions of fantasy, the right to literature and Romanticism. The nucleus of the analysis is in classes Candido taught to graduate students at the then Instituto de Letras, História e Psicologia de Assis, in which the author outlines the traits he perceives as essential to an understanding of Romanticism and Modernity. Finally, the study lays out a hypothesis concerning the consequences and the tendencies that emerge from the collapse of the Romantic spirit, reflecting on the paths of imagination and literature in our time.
subject: Dossiê
  topic: section
subject: Romanticism
  topic: keywords
subject: Modernity
  topic: keywords
subject: Imagination
  topic: keywords
subject: Literary form
  topic: keywords
subject: Present time
  topic: keywords
creator: Nathalia Elisa Colli
rights: Copyright (c) 2025 Nathalia Elisa Colli https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
date: 2025-11-08
publication date: 2025-11-08
starting page: 22
ending page: 37
doi: 10.11606/issn.2448-1769.mag.2025.242074

Three Poems from W. B. Yeats’s Last Poems (1939): “The Man and the Echo,” “The Circus Animals’ Desertion,” and “Politics”
type: item
description: This article proposes a translation of three poems by W. B. Yeats, written in final stages of his life. “The Man and the Echo,” “The Circus Animals’ Desertion,” and “Politics” were published together in The Atlantic and The London Mercury in January 1939, just a few weeks shy of the poet’s death, and all three were later included in the posthumous collection Last Poems (1939). In the first two, the poet reviews his own career, reflecting on his engagement with Irish nationalism and his relation to the Symbolist movement. In the short lyric “Politics,” the speaker addresses the contradiction between political commitment and the sacrifice of personal happiness.
subject: Dossiê
  topic: section
subject: W. B. Yeats
  topic: keywords
subject: poetry in translation
  topic: keywords
subject: symbolism
  topic: keywords
subject: modernism
  topic: keywords
subject: politics
  topic: keywords
creator: Luís Felipe Ferrari
rights: Copyright (c) 2025 Luís Felipe Ferrari https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
date: 2025-11-08
publication date: 2025-11-08
starting page: 38
ending page: 49
doi: 10.11606/issn.2448-1769.mag.2025.241176

transparências: imagining futures so that there can be a future
type: item
description: This report presents the experience transparências, objects conceived from poems by Mário de Andrade and Oswald de Andrade, and their introduction in classes on Modernism. The proposal sought to discuss the movement beyond the reiteration of the critical canon, treating the texts as living matter that still resonates in today’s São Paulo. To this end, hybrid objects were created: glass jars containing water collected from the Tietê River and soil from the Jaraguá Indigenous Reserve, upon which verses by the authors were inscribed. The gesture aimed to satirize the institutional canonization of these names and to reactivate the insurgent force of their works, articulating poetic word, material memory, and urban space. On the pedagogical level, the collection of materials and the presentation of the objects sought to engage students. The questions raised revealed the potential of the practice to open horizons of interdisciplinarity and the imagination of futures. More than preserving modernist memory, the proposal invited students to experience the iconoclastic gesture, desacralizing the canon and reinscribing it in everyday urban life. Thus, transparências seeks to combine cultural critique, artistic intervention, and teaching practice, reaffirming Modernism’s capacity to instigate reflection and invention concerning city, nature, and culture.
subject: Dossiê
  topic: section
subject: Modernism
  topic: keywords
subject: Interdisciplinarity
  topic: keywords
subject: Poetry
  topic: keywords
subject: City
  topic: keywords
creator: Felipe Marcondes da Costa
rights: Copyright (c) 2025 Felipe Marcondes da Costa https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
date: 2025-11-08
publication date: 2025-11-08
starting page: 50
ending page: 57
doi: 10.11606/issn.2448-1769.mag.2025.240838

Verbal and nonverbal art in 1930: the partnership between Arnaldo Tabayá and Cornélio Penna
type: item
description: The following paper aims to analyse the particularities of the partnership between two important names of the Brazilian 1930s Novel: Arnaldo Tabayá and Cornélio Penna. Although he would later establish himself as a writer in 1935, Penna worked with the author as a visual artist, illustrating the cover of Tabayá’s novel Badu, published by Editora Guanabara, and a short story called “A dama de negro”, published in the newspaper A Nação, in 1932 and 1933, respectively. It is possible to observe how the two of them contribute to each other’s work. Even while working within the constraints of Tabayá's narratives, it is possible to trace a subtle evolution in Penna’s art over the years and according to the historical and artistic context of that specific time. To understand Cornélio Penna’s characteristics as a visual artist, we draw on considerations made by Alexandre Eulalio (1980), as well as a research on his published projects and sketchbooks, according to the catalog from Fundação Casa de Rui Barbosa (2023) and Caderno de Pinturas e Desenhos, by Cornélio Penna, published by Faria e Silva Editora, in 2020. For Arnaldo Tabayá’s life and work, extensive research was conducted using Hemeroteca Digital, which, for this particular paper, led to the discovery of one short story illustrated by Penna, and a review made by Tabayá about Penna’s first novel, Fronteira (1935).
subject: Ensaios Temáticos
  topic: section
subject: Arnaldo Tabayá
  topic: keywords
subject: Cornelio Penna
  topic: keywords
subject: Illustration
  topic: keywords
subject: Woodcut
  topic: keywords
subject: Partnership
  topic: keywords
creator: Bianca Bosco
rights: Copyright (c) 2025 Bianca Bosco https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
date: 2025-11-08
publication date: 2025-11-08
starting page: 110
ending page: 120
doi: 10.11606/issn.2448-1769.mag.2025.236346

The testimonial essence of slavery's remnants in Lobivar Matos' poetry
type: item
description: This article examines the poetry of the intellectual Lobivar Matos as a framework of testimonial theory, highlighting how his works Areôtorare: poemas boróros (1935) and Sarobá: poemas (1936) bear witness to lived narratives in the city of Corumbá during the 1930s, prior to the partition of the state of Mato Grosso. Focusing on the Corumbaense poet, the study emphasizes his writing as both literature and cultural memory of the state, evident in each verse that deconstructs the pains underlying his poetics. The work also addresses local histories of Black neighborhoods and forms of labor analogous to slavery, often overlooked by global narratives but given voice in Lobivar Matos’s poems. The analysis of his testimony is situated within contexts of extreme poverty, pain, suffering, and marginalization in Corumbá’s peripheral neighborhoods, underscoring the significance of his poetic expression. The research considers diverse ideological and epistemological influences, reflecting on the history of colonization and its social and territorial impacts. The discussion is structured into three main topics, exploring space, temporality, lived experience, and the poet’s productions in the 1930s, drawing on theoretical contributions from Márcio Seligmann-Silva (2010) and Paul Ricoeur (2007).
subject: Tema livre
  topic: section
subject: Lobivar Matos
  topic: keywords
subject: Testimonial poetry
  topic: keywords
subject: Corumbá
  topic: keywords
creator: Washington Batista Leite
creator: Paulo Bungart Neto
rights: Copyright (c) 2025 Washington Batista Leite, Paulo Bungart Neto https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
date: 2025-11-08
publication date: 2025-11-08
starting page: 159
ending page: 169
doi: 10.11606/issn.2448-1769.mag.2025.236245

Poetics of (dis)encounter in "O livro das semelhanças"
type: item
description: The article analyzes poetic procedures concerning the relation between subject and alterity present in O livro das semelhanças, by Ana Martins Marques. In dialogue with critical discussions on contemporary Brazilian poetry, the text seeks to understand how the notions of archive and community take part in the book’s composition. To this end, it analyzes poems that focus on different means of producing encounters and the tensions involved in this exercise. It concludes that the book dramatizes key characteristics of community according to Jean-Luc Nancy, such as the excess produced over the structures of signification and the non-closure in an identity, but the constant presentation of a plural being-in-common.
subject: Tema livre
  topic: section
subject: Ana Martins Marques
  topic: keywords
subject: Contemporary poetry
  topic: keywords
subject: Community
  topic: keywords
subject: Archive
  topic: keywords
creator: Lucas Vinicius Vebber Cardenas
rights: Copyright (c) 2025 Lucas Cardenas https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
date: 2025-11-08
publication date: 2025-11-08
starting page: 190
ending page: 202
doi: 10.11606/issn.2448-1769.mag.2025.236291

European Modernism in Tomasi di Lampedusa’s Literary Lessons: From criticism of Sicilian backwardness to dialogue with tradition
type: item
description: Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa is an example of a writer to whom Edward Said attributed the notion of “late style.” Isolated from intellectual life for much of his existence, the Sicilian aristocrat found in self-directed reading and, later, in the teaching of English and French literature, the formal grounding and critical repertoire that would support the writing of his only novel, Il Gattopardo, conceived in the final years of his life and published posthumously. In this article, we suggest that, by engaging with modern European literature in his literary lessons, the author formulated reflections that guided his own writing and that served, at the same time, as a response to a notorious Sicilian cultural backwardness, to which he gave formal treatment in his novel.
subject: Ensaios Temáticos
  topic: section
subject: Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
  topic: keywords
subject: European modernism
  topic: keywords
subject: Sicilian backwardness
  topic: keywords
creator: Júlia Corrêa da Rocha
rights: Copyright (c) 2025 Júlia Corrêa da Rocha https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
date: 2025-11-08
publication date: 2025-11-08
starting page: 148
ending page: 157
doi: 10.11606/issn.2448-1769.mag.2025.236350

A blood debt: slavery, gendered violence, and the afterlife of slavery in Kindred, by Octavia E. Butler
type: item
description: Kindred (1979), by Octavia E. Butler, is a key work for understanding how the structures of slavery remain operative in contemporary social dynamics. Through the experience of Dana, a Black woman from the 20th century who is transported back to the era of slavery, the novel weaves together temporalities and highlights how race, gender, and power shape both historical and current relationships. This essay proposes a critical reading of the novel through the lens of the “unpayable debt” concept developed by Denise Ferreira da Silva (2024), expanded through dialogue with Saidiya Hartman (2025) and Jennifer Morgan (2004), who argue that sexual violence and forced reproduction lie at the heart of the logic of slavery. By analyzing the ambiguity of affect, the traps of seduction, and the instrumentalization of the Black female body, the essay argues that Kindred offers a radical critique of the notion of slavery as a closed past, revealing it as a structure that persists within racial modernity.
subject: Tema livre
  topic: section
subject: Slavery
  topic: keywords
subject: Trauma
  topic: keywords
subject: Gender
  topic: keywords
subject: Affect
  topic: keywords
subject: Power
  topic: keywords
creator: Mayara Luiz Barbosa
rights: Copyright (c) 2025 Mayara Luiz Barbosa https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
date: 2025-11-08
publication date: 2025-11-08
starting page: 170
ending page: 178
doi: 10.11606/issn.2448-1769.mag.2025.236348

Ekphrasis and/in poetry: notes on the contemporary debate
type: item
description: This paper seeks to recover the main reflections on ekphrasis within the scope of lyric poetry, published between the second half of the twentieth century and the early years of the twenty-first century. Beginning with the rehabilitation of the term by Leo Spitzer (2002), it outlines a path that identifies seminal points in the debate, such as Murray Krieger’s ekphrastic principle (2019), according to which the illusion of the natural (pictorial) sign would be the main ambition of the procedure; James Heffernan’s paragonal model (1993), based on a (ideological) dichotomous perspective between text and image; and the recognition of a collaborative dialogic relationship between the verbal and the visual, as advocated by Elizabeth Loizeaux (2008), David Kennedy (2012, 2015), and Claus Clüver (2019).
subject: Tema livre
  topic: section
subject: Ekphrasis
  topic: keywords
subject: Poetry
  topic: keywords
subject: Interart studies
  topic: keywords
creator: Gustavo Machado Costa
rights: Copyright (c) 2025 Gustavo Machado Costa https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
date: 2025-11-08
publication date: 2025-11-08
starting page: 223
ending page: 230
doi: 10.11606/issn.2448-1769.mag.2025.236347

The art of seeing, or the impossible art of unseeing
type: item
description: Alice Munro, the renowned Canadian short story writer, wrote little about the challenges of literary creation. In her work, however, it is possible to find stories that engage with this very issue, offering compelling insights into the artistic process and the material from which fiction is crafted. Beyond a brief commentary on stories that explicitly address the theme – such as “Material”, from the collection Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You (2011), and “The Photographer”, from Lives of Girls and Women (2014) – this essay seeks to explore a more ambiguous subject: the relationship her narratives establish with the act of looking, suggesting that something may be said here about the artist’s gaze – its powers, its risks, its pains. These reflections are grounded in Walter Benjamin’s concept of aura, closely linked to the way it is inscribed in the poetry of Charles Baudelaire, particularly in certain poems from As flores do mal (2019).
subject: Ensaios de Curso
  topic: section
subject: Alice Munro
  topic: keywords
subject: gaze
  topic: keywords
subject: aura
  topic: keywords
subject: Charles Baudelaire
  topic: keywords
creator: Marina Soares Nogara
rights: Copyright (c) 2025 Marina Soares Nogara https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
date: 2025-11-08
publication date: 2025-11-08
starting page: 232
ending page: 241
doi: 10.11606/issn.2448-1769.mag.2025.236341

The Flâneur's Ruins: From Bourgeois Idleness to the Sandwich-Man
type: item
description: This article examines the transformations of the flâneur in Walter Benjamin’s essays, from his portrayal as a rentier and idle observer in mid-19th century Paris to his salaried and precarious incarnation as a sandwich man, also addressing the return of Hessel’s Berlin flâneur in the 20th century (already under the sign of hostility). It proposes a cartography of the early, middle, and late phases of the flâneur, articulating the conceptual image of this philosophical type with its historical trace. In modernity, under the pressures of an emerging capitalist structure, both poet and poetry are compelled to seek a new place after the fall of art’s Edenic paradise. Common labor and poetic labor come into tension, as do individual subjectivity and collective spirit within the crowd.
subject: Ensaios Temáticos
  topic: section
subject: Flâneur
  topic: keywords
subject: Walter Benjamin
  topic: keywords
subject: Modernity
  topic: keywords
subject: Paris
  topic: keywords
creator: Jeison Karnal da Silva
rights: Copyright (c) 2025 Jeison Karnal da Silva https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
date: 2025-11-08
publication date: 2025-11-08
starting page: 132
ending page: 147
doi: 10.11606/issn.2448-1769.mag.2025.236333

A critic's preferences. On some assumptions from Leo Spitzer's method.
type: item
description: This text seeks to raise some questions regarding Leo Spitzer's method. The work begins by investigating the emphasis that the critic gives to the personal preferences of the reader who sets out to analyze a text. It then seeks to articulate this importance with the Romanist's peculiar way of understanding the artistic unity of the literary work, and finally, it asks whether this way is related to an approach specific to the Romanist tradition.
subject: Ensaios de Curso
  topic: section
subject: Leo Spitzer
  topic: keywords
subject: Literary theory
  topic: keywords
subject: Romanistics
  topic: keywords
creator: Joao Candido Cartocci Maia
rights: Copyright (c) 2025 Joao Candido Cartocci Maia https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
date: 2025-11-08
publication date: 2025-11-08
starting page: 242
ending page: 249
doi: 10.11606/issn.2448-1769.mag.2025.236288

Making literature in a collective and eccentric way in the poem Paris não tem centro
type: item
description: This essay aims to present a reading of the poem Paris não tem centro, by Marília Garcia, considering the concept of intergeneric text, proposed by Lygia Davis. This indeterminate textual zone demonstrates the failure of traditional forms since there is much to say that transcends the limits of closed genres. In view of this perspective, the contemporary short forms, and their variations, constitute a significant space for destabilizing these internalized rules and presenting other ways of making and conceiving literary art. In addition, the essay also discusses the question of authorship and originality and their connections with translation works.
subject: Ensaios de Curso
  topic: section
subject: Marília Garcia
  topic: keywords
subject: Literary translation
  topic: keywords
subject: Poetry
  topic: keywords
subject: Autorship
  topic: keywords
creator: Fábia Balotim Alves
rights: Copyright (c) 2025 Fábia Balotim Alves https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
date: 2025-11-08
publication date: 2025-11-08
starting page: 250
ending page: 257
doi: 10.11606/issn.2448-1769.mag.2025.236294

Jorge Luis Borges and the second-hand narrators of El informe de Brodie (1970)
type: item
description: Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) launched, in 1970, a collection of unpublished short stories, collected in El informe de Brodie. Defined since the Prologue as “direct and realistic” reports, they are distinguished from the “baroque and labyrinthine” ones of his previous short story collections (Ficciones [1944] and El Aleph [1949]) due to their local subject matter. The objective of this article is to analyze the role of the narrator in the short stories that review the writer’s work and some aesthetic and political-cultural positions of the past, while attempting to recover a voice that has been lost. Borges uses informant narrators and secondhand stories to fictionally elaborate stories that try to rescue this voice through second narrators who often clash with themselves or their sources.
subject: Tema livre
  topic: section
subject: Argentine literature
  topic: keywords
subject: Fiction
  topic: keywords
subject: Jorge Luis Borges
  topic: keywords
subject: Narrative Voice
  topic: keywords
subject: Short Stories
  topic: keywords
creator: Umberto Luiz Miele
rights: Copyright (c) 2025 Umberto Luiz Miele https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
date: 2025-11-08
publication date: 2025-11-08
starting page: 215
ending page: 222
doi: 10.11606/issn.2448-1769.mag.2025.236292

"It is a mute photograph. This book is a silence": considerations on incommunicability in A hora da estrela
type: item
description: This article aims to analyze how incommunicability is formalized in A hora da estrela (1977), in order to reflect on what this process reveals about Brazil in the 1970s. To this end, it investigates the challenges faced by the literate subject in representing the marginalized, as well as the ineffective communication of someone who has never been granted the right to speak out. From this framework emerges a fruitful discussion on the divide between the intellectual class and the underprivileged, and on the degrading condition of the Northeastern migrant within a context of conservative modernization that denies full integration. The hypothesis proposed is that, by bringing these issues to the fore, Clarice Lispector’s narrative exposes specific tensions within Brazilian society during the period in which the novella was published.
subject: Tema livre
  topic: section
subject: A hora da estrela
  topic: keywords
subject: Clarice Lispector
  topic: keywords
subject: Incommunicability
  topic: keywords
subject: Literature and Society
  topic: keywords
creator: Leandro Antognoli Caleffi
rights: Copyright (c) 2025 Leandro Antognoli Caleffi https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
date: 2025-11-08
publication date: 2025-11-08
starting page: 203
ending page: 214
doi: 10.11606/issn.2448-1769.mag.2025.236272

A Very Brief Overview of Surrealism in Brazil, by Mário de Andrade
type: item
description: Starting from the controversial academic reception of Surrealism in Brazil – specifically regarding its presence in the country during the 20th century – this article aims to map Mário de Andrade’s perspective on the matter. It is possible to infer that the author of Macunaíma had contact with André Breton’s “Surrealist Manifesto”, as suggested by a letter from Sérgio Milliet, as well as with the poetic works of several important authors associated with the surrealist group, based on the books in his personal library – preserved at the Institute of Brazilian Studies (IEB) at the University of São Paulo (USP) – and his annotations on index cards. In this way, drawing on his critical texts published in various press outlets at the time, as well as on his epistolary output, this study seeks to identify the publications in which the São Paulo-born author recognized traits and influences of the French movement. Based on this survey, the aim is to understand what Mário de Andrade understood by Surrealism, and which aesthetic characteristics he associated with the movement led by Breton. He identified these influences in several of his contemporaries, including some of the most prominent figures of the Brazilian modernist movement, such as Prudente de Moraes Neto, Manuel Bandeira, Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Fernando Mendes de Almeida, Rosário Fusco, among others. Finally, considering that Mário also discussed these ideas with some of these authors in his correspondence, it can be concluded that his perspective on Surrealism may be representative of the understanding of the movement that prevailed at the time within a particular social sphere—such as among intellectuals or young artists, for instance, from that time.
subject: Ensaios Temáticos
  topic: section
subject: Mário de Andrade
  topic: keywords
subject: Surrealism
  topic: keywords
subject: Readers-reponse criticism
  topic: keywords
creator: Adam Henrique Novaes
rights: Copyright (c) 2025 Adam Henrique Novaes https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
date: 2025-11-08
publication date: 2025-11-08
starting page: 101
ending page: 109
doi: 10.11606/issn.2448-1769.mag.2025.236246

Balzac and the Book of Revelation
type: item
description: Inspired by the Apocalypse of John, Honoré de Balzac summons Jesus Christ for a second visit to Earth and makes him an accomplice to reinvent part of the prophecy of the end times, now adapted to the Armageddon of Rome. The novelist imagines a symbolic cataclysm of the religious world, prophesying the fall of the Empire of Cathedrals, that is, the Roman Church, with its priests, dogmas, and sacraments. Catholicism is judged and condemned by divine fury. The climax of this condemnation is found in Jesus Christ in Flanders (Jésus-Christ en Flandre), a short story in which Balzac recreates the passage from the Gospel of John, transporting the scene of the son of God walking on water to the icy coastline of Belgium. In the second part of the narrative, the figure of the great prostitute of the Apocalypse is alluded to represent the nineteenth-century decay of the Church of Peter. This article will highlight and analyze the most significant moments of Jesus Christ in Flanders.
subject: Tema livre
  topic: section
subject: Honoré de Balzac
  topic: keywords
subject: Book of Revelation
  topic: keywords
subject: Bible
  topic: keywords
subject: Irony
  topic: keywords
subject: Jesus Christ in Flanders
  topic: keywords
creator: Lucius De Mello
rights: Copyright (c) 2025 Lucius De Mello https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
date: 2025-11-08
publication date: 2025-11-08
starting page: 179
ending page: 189
doi: 10.11606/issn.2448-1769.mag.2025.236238

The yeses of Molly Bloom and Mrs. Ramsay
type: item
description: This article examines the use of the adverb “yes” by the characters Molly Bloom, in Ulysses (1922), and Mrs. Ramsay, in To the Lighthouse (1927). Molly’s use of “yes” in her interior monologue is tied to a subjective time that contracts and expands according to her drives, overriding the objective time of Dublin’s clocks. On the other hand, Mrs. Ramsay’s use of “yes” highlights a thematic circularity, blending subjective and objective time while reaffirming the social roles she occupies as a wife, mother, and hostess, in contrast to Molly’s bodily self-assertion. Moreover, while Molly is absorbed in her interior monologue, Woolf’s characters share a social temporality, which prevents the experience of a maximized timelessness such as Molly’s. Finally, despite stylistic differences, the article concludes that both Joyce and Woolf use “yes” to unveil temporal complexities that challenge the traditional time of the novel, as well as aspects of their characters’ interiority that are not immediately apparent.
subject: Ensaios Temáticos
  topic: section
subject: Ulysses
  topic: keywords
subject: James Joyce
  topic: keywords
subject: To the Lighthouse
  topic: keywords
subject: Virginia Woolf
  topic: keywords
subject: Modernism
  topic: keywords
creator: Fernando Moreira Bufalari
rights: Copyright (c) 2025 Fernando Moreira Bufalari https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
date: 2025-11-08
publication date: 2025-11-08
starting page: 121
ending page: 131
doi: 10.11606/issn.2448-1769.mag.2025.236237

Firing into the air: Notes on the motivation for action in Hedda Gabler (1890)
type: item
description: Hedda Gabler (1890), the eighth play in Henrik Ibsen's so-called "modern cycle", brings the impotence of the dramatic character to a paroxysm. Hedda agonisingly pursues the accomplishment of action, but this escapes the causal and interindividual logic of bourgeois drama. "So what was driving her, what force was moving her?" – the question put to Hedda is also the one we face here. The essay approaches this issue through the lens of firing into the air – the gesture of a character that simultaneously revolts against paralysis and reaches nothing.
subject: Ensaios de Curso
  topic: section
subject: Ibsen
  topic: keywords
subject: Hedda Gabler
  topic: keywords
subject: The crisis of drama
  topic: keywords
creator: Ana Hirszman de Arruda Sampaio
rights: Copyright (c) 2025 Ana Hirszman de Arruda Sampaio https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
date: 2025-11-08
publication date: 2025-11-08
starting page: 258
ending page: 268
doi: 10.11606/issn.2448-1769.mag.2025.236227

A blooming stone in regionalism: reading "O sertanejo falando", by João Cabral de Melo Neto
type: item
description: This article is a close reading of the poem “O sertanejo falando” by João Cabral de Melo Neto, published in A educação pela pedra (1966). The poem is understood as a paradigm of the ways in which the sertanejo's mode of enunciation is represented within the modern tradition of regionalist literature: sometimes the speech is sweetened and “sweet” - as in the style of Guimarães Rosa - and sometimes it is rough and bumpy - as in Graciliano Ramos' Vidas Secas (1937). In this poem, João Cabral creates a synthesis of these instances - between heaven and hell, in the terms of Alfredo Bosi - as well as unfolding themes dear to his own poetics. In this sense, the poem can be seen as an outpost of Cabral's poetics to the extent that it establishes fruitful dialogues with the modern tradition of Brazilian regionalism.
subject: Ensaios Temáticos
  topic: section
subject: Modernism
  topic: keywords
subject: Regionalism
  topic: keywords
subject: Poetic of silence
  topic: keywords
subject: João Cabral de Melo Neto
  topic: keywords
creator: Leonardo Augusto Castilho Thomaz
rights: Copyright (c) 2025 Leonardo Augusto Castilho Thomaz https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
date: 2025-11-08
publication date: 2025-11-08
starting page: 86
ending page: 100
doi: 10.11606/issn.2448-1769.mag.2025.235808

The vertigo of falling: notes on a singular narrator
type: item
description: This article investigates the construction of the narrative point of view in Italo Svevo’s novel Zeno's Conscience (1923). In this experimental narrative, the narrator constructs formal elements to rhetorically normalize his cynical behavior. Thus, his unreliable and even dizzying point of view invites an unexpected comparison: for the Brazilian reader familiar with the cynical narrator inaugurated by Machado de Assis, the cynicism becomes a common ground in the European and Brazilian aesthetic experience.
subject: Ensaios Temáticos
  topic: section
subject: Zeno's Conscience
  topic: keywords
subject: Italo Svevo
  topic: keywords
subject: unreliable narrator
  topic: keywords
creator: Dimitri Takamatsu Arantes
rights: Copyright (c) 2025 Dimitri Takamatsu Arantes https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
date: 2025-11-08
publication date: 2025-11-08
starting page: 74
ending page: 85
doi: 10.11606/issn.2448-1769.mag.2025.235890

Vinte vezes Magma
type: item
description: Publicada pela primeira vez em 1994, a revista Magma chega ao seu 30º aniversário. Criada pelos alunos do departamento de Teoria Literária e Literatura Comparada da USP para divulgar seus trabalhos acadêmicos, os estudantes assumiram – e ainda assumem – todas as etapas do processo editorial, transformando a revista em um espaço de aprendizado prático. Feita por e para estudantes, a Magma envolveu, durante esses 30 anos, diversas gerações de pós-graduandos. Reunimos aqui os temas mais populares na revista ao longo desse período, separando-os por autores (brasileiros e estrangeiros), gêneros literários e idiomas traduzidos.
subject: Editorial
  topic: section
subject: Apresentação
  topic: keywords
subject: Temas
  topic: keywords
subject: Autores
  topic: keywords
creator: Raquel Abuin Siphone
creator: Maria Elisa Perez Pagan
rights: Copyright (c) 2024 Raquel Abuin Siphone, Maria Elisa Perez Pagan https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
date: 2024-11-18
publication date: 2024-11-18
starting page: 18
ending page: 22
doi: 10.11606/issn.2448-1769.mag.2024.231087

Editorial
type: item
subject: Editorial
  topic: section
subject: Editorial
  topic: keywords
creator: Fabio Pomponio Saldanha
creator: Maria Elisa Perez Pagan
creator: Luís Felipe Ferrari
creator: Samara Fernanda Buoso
creator: Raquel Abuin Siphone
rights: Copyright (c) 2024 Fabio Pomponio Saldanha, Maria Elisa Perez Pagan, Luís Felipe Ferrari, Samara Fernanda Buoso, Raquel Abuin Siphone https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
date: 2024-11-18
publication date: 2024-11-18
starting page: 10
ending page: 16
doi: 10.11606/issn.2448-1769.mag.2024.231086

Presence, Meaning, and Literary Criticism: An Interview with Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht
type: item
description: In an interview conducted in August this year, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht discussed his concept of “production of presence” in literary criticism, exploring Heidegger’s influence and the connections between aesthetics and politics. An emeritus professor at Stanford University with strong ties to Brazil, he shared ideas from his new work on themes like epiphany and imagination, maintaining his accessible and provocative style, characteristic of his intellectual trajectory.
subject: Entrevista
  topic: section
subject: Interview
  topic: keywords
subject: Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht
  topic: keywords
subject: Presence
  topic: keywords
subject: Meaning
  topic: keywords
subject: Literary Criticism
  topic: keywords
creator: Caio Vinicius Russo Nogueira
creator: Maria Elisa Perez Pagan
rights: Copyright (c) 2024 Caio Vinicius Russo, Maria Elisa Perez Pagan https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
date: 2024-11-18
publication date: 2024-11-18
starting page: 27
ending page: 35
doi: 10.11606/issn.2448-1769.mag.2024.230869

The sinister glissando of the years: time and transcience in Carson McCullers’ short fiction
type: item
description: This essay proposes an analysis of "The Sojourner," a short story penned by American author Carson McCullers, with a specific focus on the themes of time and transience within the narrative. Through close reading, our aim is to explore how these themes not only surface in the theme but also intricately shape the structure, ultimately portraying the improvisation of human existence. Delving into both the content and stylistic elements of the story, we aim to construct an interpretation that delves into the realms of memory, personal temporality, crises of inner life; and the pervasive sense of isolation—a theme which McCullers underscored as central to her fiction. Furthermore, we endeavor to draw connections between the societal backdrop of mid-20th century United States and the temporal experiences depicted within the story, particularly through the lens of disintegration as perceived by the protagonist, John Ferris.Our theoretical framework draws upon insights from esteemed critics including Walter Benjamin, Fredric Jameson, and the Brazilian critic Benedito Nunes, borrowing notably from Nunes' concept of "psychological time." Additionally, we integrate perspectives gleaned from critiques of McCullers' oeuvre as well as reflections from the author herself, shedding light on the underlying American ethos. Ultimately, our aim is to underscore how "The Sojourner" serves as a poignant exploration of humanity's struggle to navigate the relentless flow of time, its inevitable failures in attempting to assert control, and the enduring omnipresence of temporal forces.
subject: Tema livre
  topic: section
subject: Carson McCullers
  topic: keywords
subject: The sojourner
  topic: keywords
subject: Time
  topic: keywords
subject: American Short Fiction
  topic: keywords
subject: 20th Century
  topic: keywords
creator: Giovana Proença Gonçalves
rights: Copyright (c) 2024 Giovana Proença Gonçalves https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
date: 2024-11-18
publication date: 2024-11-18
starting page: 63
ending page: 73
doi: 10.11606/issn.2448-1769.mag.2024.224010

Paul Celan's poetry and “On truth and lies in a nonmoral sense” by Nietzsche: approaches
type: item
description: In Twilight of the Idols: or How to Philosophize with a Hammer (1889), Nietzsche establishes, in a highly elucidative manner, the role of morality and truth in the construction of nihilism as a concept. The philosopher understands that morality, especially Christian morality, denies present life in favor of a transcendental ideal, becoming a "misunderstanding" that offers solace but also imprisons truth in static and illusory concepts. Furthermore, and no less important, Nietzsche questions language, the primary power of man, as an instrument for crystallizing these concepts. Therefore, I intend to examine the text "Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense" (1873), an essay in which Nietzsche, besides emphasizing humanity's relentless pursuit of truth – while acknowledging the inherent illusion in that act – discusses human intellect, dismantles the traditional concept of truth, and questions the limits of language, the raw material of intellect. Additionally, in light of the considerations presented in the mentioned essay, I dedicate myself to analyzing some poems by Paul Celan (1920-1970), in which a movement quite similar to that proposed by Nietzsche stands out, as language is handled as a fluid tool that can point to complex truths and deep insights but can never fully capture them.
subject: Tema livre
  topic: section
subject: Nietzsche
  topic: keywords
subject: Language
  topic: keywords
subject: Truth
  topic: keywords
subject: Paul Celan
  topic: keywords
subject: Transvaluation of concepts
  topic: keywords
creator: Laysa Beretta
rights: Copyright (c) 2024 Laysa Beretta https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
date: 2024-11-18
publication date: 2024-11-18
starting page: 139
ending page: 147
doi: 10.11606/issn.2448-1769.mag.2024.224018

The Supernatural in Fiction
type: item
description: This is a translation of Virginia Woolf's review "The Supernatural in Fiction" (1958) about Dorothy Scarborough's book The Supernatural in Modern Fiction (1917). Along with "Gothic Romance" (1921) and "Henry James' Ghost Stories" (1921), the text is part of the brief moments in her work in which she developed the question of the supernatural, more specifically ghost stories. In this sense, in "The Supernatural in Fiction", while commenting on general aspects of Scarborough's book, Woolf also reflects on the status of supernatural fiction in the 20th century.
subject: Tradução
  topic: section
subject: Virginia Woolf
  topic: keywords
subject: Supernatural
  topic: keywords
subject: Ghosts
  topic: keywords
subject: Fear
  topic: keywords
subject: Fiction
  topic: keywords
creator: Virginia Woolf
creator: Carla Lento Faria
rights: Copyright (c) 2024 Carla Lento Faria; Virginia Woolf https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
date: 2024-11-18
publication date: 2024-11-18
starting page: 243
ending page: 247
doi: 10.11606/issn.2448-1769.mag.2024.224009

The dramatic monologue in Percy B. Shelley: Prometheus between tyranny and freedom
type: item
description: Starting from the concepts of dramatic monologue, lyrical addressing and fictionalization of the poetic voice, this article will present Prometheus Unchained (1820) by Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) in the sense of discovering the fundamental determinations of the reordering of the classic myth of Prometheus, which is worked out in the context of the modernity of the social relations of production of capitalism. In the very concreteness of the text, the opposition between Prometheus and Jupiter takes on greater proportions throughout the monologue. This leads the listener and the reader to sympathize with the speaker and the positions he takes.
subject: Tema livre
  topic: section
subject: Myth
  topic: keywords
subject: Classical antiquity
  topic: keywords
subject: Modernity
  topic: keywords
subject: Shelley
  topic: keywords
subject: Prometheus
  topic: keywords
subject: dramatic monologue
  topic: keywords
creator: Guilherme Augusto Brandão Ferreira
rights: Copyright (c) 2024 Guilherme Augusto Brandão Ferreira https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
date: 2024-11-18
publication date: 2024-11-18
starting page: 87
ending page: 94
doi: 10.11606/issn.2448-1769.mag.2024.224006