Slavery and Freedom, Madness and Reason in Brazil; The Fiction of Machado de Assis

Praised by Woody Allen and Salman Rushdie as the greatest Brazilian novelist of the 19th Century, Machado de Assis (1839-1908) became a recent pop star of "world literature." To Harold Bloom he is "a kind of miracle," as the grandson of freed slaves in Brazil, who deserved to be included in Bloom's book Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds. In his texts, a paradoxical combination of guilt and innocence, jealous and love challenges the reader to make risk choices wisely. This course presents Machado de Assis masterpieces: the novels, The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas (1881) and Dom Casmurro (1900), the short novel The Alienist (1882) and a selection of his short stories. Key critical concepts and an overview of his reception in Brazil and in the US will support our discussions.