Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956) escreve no início da década de 1930 um ciclo de treze sonetos nos quais uma alta carga erótica se alia à já programática combatividade política do autor e a seu radical conhecimento das tradições literárias europeias. Escritos em paralelo com os sonetos de Margarete Steffin (1908-1941), os de Brecht parecem ocupar uma posição exemplar na tensíssima, mas frutífera relação do autor com a tradição. O objetivo do presente artigo é investigar em que medida esse ciclo de sonetos (só aparentemente deslocado da obra brechtiana) seria, pelo contrário, testemunho de sua coerência poetológica ao tensionar a relação com suas referências literárias, em especial com Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) nos poemas em questão. Vale-se, para isso, da análise minuciosa e da tradução de “Das zwölfte Sonett (Über die Gedichte des Dante auf die Beatrice)” – intitulado aqui “Décimo segundo soneto (Sobre os poemas de Dante acerca de Beatrice)”.

Aluisio Azevedo, the precursor of Naturalism in Brazil, retrieves a certain idea of Romanticism, Gothic, and melodrama when he publishes A mortalha de Alzira (Alzira’s Shroud) (1893). The novel derives from Théophile Gautier’s short story, “La morte amoureuse” (1836), but displays fractures with the original text. Although, in the work, Azevedo moves away from the naturalistic notion of literary representation as an “imitation of reality”, he inserts characters that carry with them the rational and scientific explanation for the series of strange events that occur in the narrative. Thus, through the relational reading of the texts (the hypertext with its hypotext, in allusion to Gérard Genette) and the uses of the mobilized concepts (melodrama, Romanticism, fantastic, Gothic), the aim is to examine the presence of naturalistic traits in the narrative that resists the gothic-romantic imagination. Therefore, the objective is to understand “the tension between the deep desires and the consonance with the environment” of the work and its author (Candido, 2006).

The aim of this paper is to analyze the discourses that permeate the short stories “Maria” and “Pôncio and his loves”, by Conceição Evaristo and Aldino Muianga, respectively, to see how the writing of these authors responds to the intersectional feminism of the multiple dimensions of gender, race and social class, based on the “enformation” given to the contents and forms that make up the narratives. To this end, it is based on Bakhtinian theory and studies on intersectionality, among others related to black feminism. The dialogical analysis reveals that the short stories present a heterodiscursivity that expresses the axiologies and evaluative positions taken from the heat of the social, cultural and historical order, in addition to ratifying the understanding that black women are forced to wage a perennial and agigantic struggle to escape the bonds of racism, machismo, misogyny and other aspects of inequality that have imprinted them since the colonial period.

The purpose of this article is to reflect on the possibilities of understanding Brazilian symbolism as a particular moment in the constitution of Brazil’s modern poetry, considering Cruz e Sousa’s work, the main poet of this movement, as a paradigm of subsequent structural transformations in Brazilian literature. This way, based on recent considerations that review the role of Brazilian avant-gardes as a fundamental point of aesthetic rupture, especially based on the work of authors who participated in or orbited the Semana de Arte Moderna (1922), we seek to highlight elements already present in fin-de-siècle poetics, in which they showed signs of understanding and incorporating elements of modern poetry. Thus, it is possible to see that aspects that are still dispersed or not considered in the evaluation of Brazilian symbolism can open paths for a review of its role in Brazilian literary historiography.

With an intense theoretical engagement in the early 20th century, Alfred Döblin was a prolific author who dedicated himself extensively to reflections on the novel. This article builds upon three concepts presented in “Construction of the Epic Work” (1928) to explore Döblin’s conception of the novel and the dialogues his work later establishes with the artistic debates of that period. To this end, we will initially introduce two key concepts from the essay: report and fantasy. Next, we will illustrate how Döblin’s utilization of the report concept stems from his early writings and his dialogue with Futurism. We will also examine the concept of fantasy and its connection to objectivity and report. Finally, we will discuss how the shift in emphasis on the relationship between report and fantasy in 1928 should be understood in the context of the ongoing debate surrounding the New Objectivity reportage novel.

This article aims to investigate the developments of modernist aesthetics in the second half of the twentieth century in the context of the Cold War and the large-scale decolonization of countries in Africa and Asia. More specifically, it addresses two literary groups in which the idea of modernism was decisive: the Modernist School (Xiandaipai) in Taiwan and the Poetry (Shi’r) magazine group in Lebanon, both operating in the 1950s and 1960s. It also mentions briefly the continuity of modernism at the end of the 1970s and beginning of the following decade in cultural spaces previously completely dominated by the aesthetics of the Eastern Bloc, such as Uzbekistan and the People’s Republic of China. Thus, it is within the intense political, ideological and cultural clashes between 1950 and 1990 that the presence of modernism is located.

Great Expectations, published in book form in 1861, is one of the last novels by the famous English writer Charles Dickens. In this novel, Dickens problematises the category of the gentleman, which was central in the Victorian context. This article focuses on the role of the conservative element, represented by Satis House and Miss Havisham, in Pip’s – the narrator – progressive trajectory towards becoming a gentleman. It also considers the narrative tone, which expresses a non-effusive attitude about the success of this trajectory and, thus, contributes to the structural ambiguity of the narrative. The analysis of these narrative elements allows the discussion of Dickens’s representation of important paradoxes of the Victorian society.

Comparing texts by the Schlegels with the treatise on imitation in fine arts by Batteux, this article analyses how early German romanticism communicates to modern literature an unrestricted idea of poetry, conceived not as a well-marked affair but as something diffuse in the world. I believe this generalized poetics conceives the relation speech/action in a way that destabilizes intellectual intentionality and the idea (essential to classical poetics) of poetry as a luxury of refined spirits. However, this legacy hasn’t always been welcomed by posterior criticism. Such is the case of Candido’s reading of Drummond, which resurrects conceptions inherent to the classicism and denies poetical character to a speech stranger to control by a subject.