Brazil Between Reality and Fiction: Macunaíma and the Cultural Heritage of the Anthropophagy Movement

Date: 

Thursday, October 12, 2017, 12:00pm to 2:00pm

Location: 

CGIS South, S050, 1730 Cambridge Street

Speaker: Sonia Netto Salomão, Professor of Portuguese and Brazilian Language and Literature, Sapienza University of Rome

Moderator: Frances Hagopian, Jorge Paulo Lemann Senior Lecturer on Government, Harvard University

The lecture illustrates the synthesis of foreign visions of Brazil and their influence on the Brazilian construction of identity best summarized in Macunaíma the novel which is a specific example of the coming together of literature history and theory. Sonia Netto Salomão has been a Full Professor of Portuguese and Brazilian Language and Literature in the Department of Humanities at Sapienza University in Rome since 2002. She has a PhD in Literary Theory (UFRJ – Federal University of Rio de Janeiro) and a post-doctoral degree in Philological Criticism and Literary Historiography (Sapienza University). In Brazil she has taught Brazilian Culture and Literary Theory in the Department of Languages and Literatures at the UFRJ and at the State University of Rio de Janeiro (UERJ). She is the President of the "Antônio Vieira" Chair (Sapienza University / Camões Institute Lisbon) Vice-President of the AISPEB (Italian Association of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies) a member of the teaching staff on the PhD program in Sciences of the Text in the Department of European American and Intercultural Studies Sapienza University and member of institutions such as the Roman Society of Philology and the Brazilian Academy of Philology. She directs the "LusoBrasiliana" book series at the Nuova Cultura publishing house and forms part of the editorial board of several journals and book series as well as coordinating international cultural and research cooperation projects with Brazilian and Portuguese universities. She has published 15 monographs 10 edited books and more than a hundred articles in national and international journals on subjects ranging from censorship in Brazil popular culture the Baroque of Antonio Vieira and his unpublished texts to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Brazilian literature. She is also involved in research projects on the Portuguese language from a multicultural perspective the birth of Brazilian linguistics and theoretical aspects of Translation Studies.