Internationalizing Brazilian Literature

Third World Literary Fortunes: Brazilian Culture and its International Reception. By Piers Armstrong. (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University; London: Associated University Presses, 1999. Pp. 262. $41.50 cloth.)

The Muffled Cries: The Writer and Literature in Authoritarian Brazil, 1964-1985. By Nancy Baden. (Maryland and Oxford: The University Press of America, 1999. Pp. 239. $34.50 paper.)

Sob O Signo Da Nova Ordem: Intelectuais Autoritários No Brasil E Na Argentina (1914-1945). By José Luis Bendicho Beired. (Série Teses. São Paulo, Brazil: Edições Loyola, 1999. Pp. 295. N.p.)

Machado De Assis: Reflections on a Brazilian Master Writer. Edited by Richard Graham. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999. Pp. 134. $11.95 paper.)

The Space In-Between: Essays on Latin American Culture. By Silviano Santiago. Edited by Ana Lúcia Gazzola, with an introduction by Ana Lúcia Gazzola and Wander Melo Miranda. Translated by Tom Burns, Ana Lúcia Gazzola, and Gareth Williams. (Post-Contemporary Interventions. Latin America in Translation/En Traducción/Em Tradução. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2001. Pp. 188. $19.95 paper.)

Brazilian literature, like all culture, has been and is being globalized, though perhaps not so much as Spanish American literature. Major works from the Brazilian literary canon and a few uncanonized contemporary writers are published in translation in many of the world's languages. One reason this internationalization is occurring in Brazil is that today's book publishers are often multinational corporations; another is that distances around the globe have disappeared as obstacles to rapid communication between writers, translators, and editors. Furthermore, whether a sleeping economic giant or political newsmaker, Brazil commands strategic importance worldwide and draws international tourists. The internationalization of Brazilian literature plays itself out in the details of where, how, and why Brazilian literature is read outside Brazil. Although always uneven and unjust (i.e., some deserving writers seem doomed to remain unknown), this internationalization is dynamic and increasing. It behooves us to understand how (if) this process is reflected in literary criticism and theory. In the books reviewed here, the job of contextualizing and explaining to the reader automatically involves reaching beyond national borders to hypothesize or analyze analogues to Brazilian literature.

These five books exemplify to a greater or lesser degree this comparative momentum. Most central to the issue of Brazil's cultural globalization are Third World Literary Fortunes: Brazilian Culture and its Literary Reception,Machado de Assis: Reflections on a Brazilian Master Writer, and individual essays in The Space In-Between: Essays on Latin American Culture in which international reception is an explicit theme. The two others, Nancy Baden's The Muffled Cries: The Writer and Literature in Authoritarian Brazil, 1964-1985 and José Luis Bendicho Beired's Sob o signo da nova ordem: Intelectuais autoritários no Brasil e na Argentina (1914-1945), are comparative in the way in which they discuss politics and its infinite interrelationships with literature, but they do not thematize the problem to any great extent. Baden, for instance, compares Brazilian writers' experiences with censorship to those of Argentine and European writers, while Beired organizes his tome around a comparison between Brazil and Argentina in the period between the two world wars, thus exposing intellectual similarities and even at times communications between nationalist conservatives.

As a translation, The Space In-Between embodies the phenomenon of Brazilian works crossing borders. Another in Duke University's excellent series of Latin America in Translation, it provides English-language readers with eleven essays by Silviano Santiago from the 1970s and 1980s. The subtitle, "Essays on Latin American Culture," alerts us to the regional (inter-national) purport rather than national interest of this writing. These essays first appeared in Brazilian journals or in one of his books: Nas malhas da letra (1989), Uma literatura nos trópicos (1978), or Vale quanto pesa: Ensaios sobre questões político-culturais (1982). Santiago's essays debate issues as disparate as Umberto Eco, Eça de...