In his 2005 novel Duas praças, Ricardo Lísias addresses the quotidian violence of contemporary São Paulo, a metropolis increasingly segregated by socio-economic classes, spatial distances, and physical barriers, as well as the concerns of truth, memory and reconciliation haunting Brazil and its neighbors in the postdictatorial years. The novel alternates between the stories of Maria, a resident of the periphery who lives within her mental fantasies, and Marita, an Argentine graduate student and suspected child of the disappeared gone missing within Brazil. While language facilitates the articulation of characters and events within the novel, it cannot render them perfectly and instead breaks down in the face of pain as Elaine Scarry reminds us or begins to stutter in the terms of Gilles Deleuze. Given its possibilities and limitations, language becomes a preoccupation for Lísias and one of the most intriguing ways to enter his fiction. Language plays a critical role in the parallel lives of Maria and Marita as they attempt to impose structure on their thoughts and experiences, a constructed spoken or written order that eventually verges towards collapse. The breakdown of language reveals the psychological states of the characters, while also indicating the limitations of translation and transnational communication between Brazilian Portuguese and Argentine Spanish. Through a closer analysis of language and translation, this paper examines Duas praças as an intervention in and commentary on the disjunctive democracy transforming Brazilian metropolises into cities of walls and the politics of memory continuing to plague postdictatorial societies throughout the region.

This paper analyzes José Saramago's Ensaio sobre a ceguiera and Ensaio sobre a lucidez as essayistic novels. After a theoretical overview of the essay as a genre, the paper focuses on the essayistic traits of these works and proposes a possible allegorical reading of these two novels.

This dissertation analyzes how travel and translation informed the construction of Brazil as modern in the 19th century, and how similar processes of transnational translation continue to shape the cultural visibility of the nation abroad in the contemporary moment. By reading journals, literary works, and cultural criticism, this study inserts Brazilian literature and culture into recent debates about translatability, world literature, and cosmopolitanism, while also underscoring the often-overlooked presence of Brazilians in the United States. The first half of the dissertation contends that Portuguese-language periodicals Correio Braziliense (London, 1808-1822), Revista Nitheroy (Paris, 1836), and O Novo Mundo (New York, 1870-1879) translated European and North American ideas of technology and education to a readership primarily in Brazil. The transnational circulation of these periodicals contributed to the self-fashioning of intellectuals who came to define the nation. To suggest parallels between Brazil and the United States in the late 19th century, the analysis of O Novo Mundo focuses on discourses of nation, modernity, and technological progress emerging in the hemispheric travels of scientists, intellectuals, and the Brazilian empire Dom Pedro II, and in the national displays at the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia.

The second half of the dissertation proposes a counterpoint to the 19th century by analyzing literature, cultural criticism, and art from the late 20th and early 21st centuries. The national coexists with the transnational in both historical periods as Brazilian intellectuals and artists look beyond Brazil in order to refine their definitions of the nation as modern. Contemporary writers like Silviano Santiago and Adriana Lisboa find themselves at home not in Brazil, but rather within the translation zones of the Americas. For Santiago, translating French theory to the Latin American context informs his concept of the space in-between, which in turn manifests itself in his fiction about Brazilians in the United States. This analysis examines how Santiago and Lisboa develop translational aesthetics in their narratives through code switching and cultural references in order to better capture the displacement experienced by their transnational characters. The relative success in translation of Lisboa’s tales of immigrant lives suggests a preference for translatability in the global literary market. The dissertation concludes by arguing that Nuno Ramos represents an alternative mode for artistic visibility beyond Brazil as a translator between genres and media whose work contests assumptions of translatability