In this study I combine Pierre Bourdieu's theoretical model for cultural production with auteur theory in an analysis of the work of acclaimed film and television director Luiz Fernando Carvalho. Perhaps best-known in the U.S. for his brilliant feature Lavoura Arcaica (To the Left of the Father, 2001), based on the novel by Raduan Nassar, most of Carvalho's activity has been in television, where he has directed adaptations of works by Ariano Suassuna (A Pedra do Reino), E�a de Queiroz (Os Maias), Carlos Alberto Soffredini (Hoje � dia de Maria), and Machado de Assis (Capitu). Carvalho's work in both film and television has distinguished him as one of the most creative directors working in Brazil and as the first full-fledged Brazilian television auteur. Indeed, Carvalho's work in television challenges traditional perceptions, moving beyond standardized formulas for mass consumption through an aesthetic that creates an amalgam of artistic modes of expression such as film, television, theater, opera, animation, puppetry, painting, dance, literature, and music, while at the same time drawing from what he calls ancestralidade, or a shared creative and hermeneutic cultural heritage.

In my dissertation I analyze how politics and film interact in Lusophone (i.e., Portuguese- speaking) countries in Europe (Portugal), South America (Brazil) and Africa (Mozambique and Angola) between the 1950s and the 1980s. During this period the countries in question were undergoing significant political changes, and film was an important medium used in the process of transformation. Portugal went from a fascist dictatorship to a democracy in 1974, Angola and Mozambique became independent in 1975, and Brazil became a military dictatorship in 1964. One of the purposes of my study is to explore and contrast the film-related policies in effect under different governments.

In the case of Portugal, fascist colonialism used film as a form of propaganda to support its occupation of Mozambique, Angola, Cabo Verde and Guinea-Bissau. With the 1974 April revolution that ended the dictatorship, film was used to advance the democratic values of the revolution. The previously mentioned African countries, especially Angola and Mozambique, used Third Cinema as a counter-discourse to Portuguese propaganda, showing in a series of documentaries how their struggle for independence was legitimate. In the case of Brazil, directors of Cinema Novo criticized neocolonialism in Brazil; the movement began in the late fifties, but underwent through significant changes when a military coup established a dictatorship that would last until 1985.

In spite of the extensive common ground among the diverse Lusophone countries, very few studies have thus far used a transatlantic approach. I start from Gilroy’s conception of the Atlantic Ocean as a space of cultural exchange, and from Shu Mei Shih and Fran?oise Lionnet’s notion of minor transnationalism to explore such issues.

My dissertation seeks to intervene in current debates about both comparative perspectives within Latin American literatures and the place of Latin America within new models of world literature. Despite the importance of this call to a more planetary approach to literature, the turn to a world scope often recapitulates problems associated with the nineteenth century emergence of the term "world literature": local concerns and traditions dissolve into the search for general patterns or persistent dependencies. If these new comparative models tend to separate the local from the construction of literature's "world," significant strains of Latin Americanist criticism have also sought to distance the local from literature and the literary, often identifying the latter alternatively with either the collapse of previous emancipatory dreams or a complicity with power and domination. Focusing on two pairs of narrative texts by the Brazilian Clarice Lispector and the Argentine Juan José Saer, I argue for a more contested notion of the literary and of the world.

Lispector's and Saer's narrative texts intertwine the literary construction of their worlds with local forms of alterity and otherness. Despite the differences between Saer's attention to an apparently more circumscribed local world in the littoral zone of Santa, Fe, Argentina, and Lispector's more seemingly abstract flights from place, their writing nonetheless meets in common spaces and experiences that have little to do with either a recognizably "Latin American" aesthetics or the generality of a world model free from contradiction, suffering, and the traces of history. In part one, on Lispector's A paixão segundo G.H. (1964) and A hora da estrela (1977), and part two on Saer's El entenado (1983) and El río sin orillas (1990), I explore the different ways that their writing represents, or contains, the possibility of altering the world and selves in literature. While the dictatorship period negatively inflects both A hora da estrela and El entenado, I argue that the inscription of their literary worlds into local, national, and regional traditions becomes a resource for more subtle connections between the texts and the periods, calling into question the attempts to make literature tell a story of either collapse or hope at the end of the last century.