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Articles by Roberto Schwarz
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Political Iridescence
in NLR 75, May-June 2012, pp. 89-117
Subjects: Music , Brazil
Brazil’s foremost literary critic engages with the autobiography of Caetano Veloso, its best-known musician. The dense weave of relations between 60s counter-culture and left movements, and its rending by years of dictatorship and capitalist triumph.
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Also available in Spanish -
Brecht's Relevance: Highs and Lows
in NLR 57, May-June 2009, pp. 85-104
Subjects: Aesthetics , World Economy and Globalization , Brazil
In what ways does Brecht’s drama—and the world-transforming impulse behind his strategies of defamiliarization—speak to times and places other than his own? Ups and downs of his resonance in Brazil and beyond, shadowing the movements of history’s leading edge.
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Also available in Spanish -
Competing Readings
in NLR 48, November-December 2007, pp. 85-107
Subjects: Literature , Brazil
Roberto Schwarz discusses the cultural-political import of rival interpretations of Machado de Assis, within the critical space of world literature. Local versus international, specific versus universal, entangled within the ironies and dizzying narrative disjunctures of a Brazilian master.
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Also available in Spanish -
A Brazilian Breakthrough
in NLR 36, November-December 2005, pp. 91-107
Subjects: Literature , Brazil
What made the greatest Brazilian novel of the nineteenth century, Machado de Assis’s Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, a masterpiece of world literature? The strange fate of realism in an ex-colonial society, in which liberalism was a ruling ideology, modernity a universal ideal, and slavery still an everyday fact of life.
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Also available in Spanish and Korean -
Preface with Questions
in NLR 24, November-December 2003, pp. 31-39
Subjects: Social Theory , Brazil
Portrait of one of Latin America’s most original sociologists, and the zoography of his native habitat. The calm iconoclasm of Francisco de Oliveira’s thought under military dictators and workers’ president alike.
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In the Land of Elefante
in NLR 22, July-August 2003, pp. 93-118
Subjects: Literature , Brazil
Brazil’s most original poet in the prism of its foremost critic. How Francisco Alvim’s lyricism unlocks the social through the colloquial, in tiny openings onto a vast space of national ambiguities and complicities.
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Also available in Spanish -
City of God
in NLR 12, November-December 2001, pp. 103-112
Subjects: Literature , Brazil
Brazil’s leading literary theorist discusses the novel whose formal innovations trace the emergence of the ganglands of the neo-favela in Rio de Janeiro today—a world away from the now etiolated recipes of magical realism.
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Brazilian Culture: Nationalism by Elimination
in NLR I/167, January-February 1988, pp. 77-90
Subjects: Nationalism , Brazil
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