Professor Librandi-Rocha specializes in Modern Brazilian Literature within a theoretical and comparative framework.
Her first book, Maranhão-Manhattan. Ensaios de Literatura Brasileira (2009) examines the deployment of meta-fiction in the works of Joaquim de Sousândrade, Murilo Mendes, Paulo Leminski, and João Guimarães Rosa as an existential and political quest; and the critical theories of Luiz Costa Lima, João Adolfo Hansen, and Augusto and Haroldo de Campos as a defense of experimentalism in fiction.
Her next book-length project is titled Writing by Ear. The Senses of World LIterature in South America. Going beyond the oral/writing divide, the book re-describes the novels of major Brazilian novelists -- Machado de Assis, Graciliano Ramos, Clarice Lispector and João Guimarães Rosa -- in relation to the sense of hearing and to the issue of listening to literature, understood as a performatic text of resonances. It concludes opening to a transamerican discussion with a reading of “El Etnógrafo,” by Jorge Luis Borges, analyzed as another answer to the Lévi-Strauss's “Writing lesson,” and in contrast to Vargas Llosa, "El Hablador", and with an analysis of the Amerindian contemporary expressions of the Guaranis in the borders of Brazil and Paraguay. The book joins a theoretical current that has been examining the importance of voice in written texts (from Latin American literary criticism to post-colonial and feminist studies), and it seeks to contribute to recent debates concerning the ontology of literature and the anthropology of fiction.
Librandi-Rocha edited and introduced the book Poemas-Vida (2008), and co-edited three recent special issues - “Literatura e Juizo de Valor”(2011), “Literatura e Viagem” (2010), and “História do Livro e da Leitura” (2009) - of Floema, a journal of Literary Theory and History edited in Brazil.
Member of the Executive Committee of the American Portuguese Studies Association, she has also begun to serve as Book Review Editor of the association's journal, ellipsis.
For a selection of writings, please click on the following link: http://stanford.academia.edu/Mar%C3%ADliaLibrandiRocha
