Marília Librandi-Rocha
Marília Librandi-Rocha
Assistant Professor of Brazilian Literature and Culture
Focal Groups: Performance Philosophy and LiteratureContact:
Pigott Hall 218
650 725 9850
mariliar@stanford.edu
Office Hours:
M-W 1:30-2:30OVERVIEW:
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: From Tristes Tropiques to the Third Margin of Literature. Going beyond the oral/writing divide, the book re-describes the novels of three major Brazilian authors (Machado de Assis, Clarice Lispector and João Guimarães Rosa) in relation to the sense of hearing and to the issue of listening to literature, understood as a text of resonances. It concludes with a reading of “El Etnógrafo,” a short story by Jorge Luis Borges, analyzed as another answer to the Lévi-Strauss's “Writing lesson,” re-examined as a perfomatic lesson. 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
CURRICULUM VITAE:
Download (right click and "save as")EDUCATION:
2003: PhD, Universidade de São Paulo, Literary Theory and Comparative Literature
Courses
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ILAC131Win2011-12
Major theoretical debates about the construction of Latin American identities, from the 19th century to the present. Readings by writers, poets, philosophers, and historians, including Rodo, Retamar, O'Gorman, Vasconcelos, Henríquez-Ureña, Ramos, Paz, Carpentier, Lezama Lima, Borges, and Fuentes.
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ILAC369Win2011-12
How does fictional prose dialogue and incorporate musical paradigms in its creation? How can one describe the voice of a fictional character and of a literary style? How could novels be described in analogy with musical and audition patterns? Theories of literacy and orality will be connected to the sense of hearing, aurality, and auditivity. Possible authors: Claude Lévi-Strauss, Derrida, Barthes, Lyotard, W. Ong, Wai Chee Dimock, Carpentier, Cortazar, Rosa, Lispector, Chatwin, Italo Calvino. Readings in English, French, Spanish and Portuguese (or in translation).
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ILAC271Spr2011-12
This course explores Brazil's literature and its representation of the country's diverse regional cultures and ecology. The course offers an in-depth discussion of Brazilian society, presenting fundamental texts that portray Brazilian landscape with its diverse eco-regions, people and culture. The program includes major authors such as Euclides da Cunha and his description of the Amazon in the early 1900s; the travels of anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss and his contact with Caduveo, Nhambiquara, Bororo and Tupi indigenous tribes; Mario de Andrade's novel, Macunaima and its ironical representation of Brazilian identity and miscegenation; Guimarães Rosa's short stories that show the imagery of the sertao and its people (the sertanejo culture); Milton Hatoum's novel, The Brothers, and its impressive portray of Manaus city in the 20th Century as an unstable world seen through the lens of Lebanese immigrants. These central books will be discussed together with critical essays about some important historical and contemporary challenges that Brazil has faced and continues to grapple with today.
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ILAC118NSpr2011-12
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.
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ILAC273Aut2010-11
Brazilian culture through poems lyrics and sounds from the 19th to the 20th Century. Songs and Lyrics by: Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Tom Jobim, Carlinhos Brown, Paulinho da Viola, Marisa Monte, Cartola. Authors may include: Gonçalves Dias, Mario de Andrade, Oswald de Andrade, Manuel Bandeira, Cecília Meireles, Murilo Mendes, Drummond, João Cabral de Melo Neto, Hilda Hilst, Antonio Cicero, among others. In Portuguese.
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ILAC365Aut2010-11
This seminar investigates the relationship between fiction and ethnography; literary theory and anthropology discussing the notion of 'anthropological fiction'. Authors: Viveiros de Castro, Roy Wagner, Alfred Gell, W.Iser, J.Clifford, Borges, Lispector, with a special focus on Guimarães Rosa and Alejo Carpentier. In Portuguese, Spanish and English.
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ILAC278AWin2010-11
The confrontation between two worlds: the Forest and the City in the Americas with a special focus on the Amazon jungle and New York City. Readings by 19th century Latin American writers such as Dario Martí Sousândrade and Carpentier including their intertexts with the Chronicles of Discovery and Conquest fictional texts travel accounts chronicles and essays.
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ILAC194ESpr2010-11
This course focuses on Afro-Brazilian culture through a variety of media that include: fictional texts (short-stories poems and novels), socio-historical and anthropological essays, music, films, and sports, dealing with racial issues in Brazilian society through a historical overview and a contemporary perspective. Authors (Machado de Assis, Joaquim Nabuco, Jorge de Lima, Jorge Amado ,Carolina de Jesus, Gilberto Freyre, Roberto DaMatta, Antonio Risério, Luis Felipe D¿Alencastro); Music (Samba Choro MPB); Sports (Soccer, Capoeira); Religion (Candomblé Umbanda); Films (Orfeu Negro Barravento Ó Pai Ó).
