Nature and Narrative. Approaches to a Brazilian Landscape.
This volume of the Santa Barbara Portuguese Studies consists of articles that were presented in the international Congress that was held at UCSB on January 13th and 14th, 2025, at the Mosher Alumni House.
Nature and Narrative. Approaches to a Brazilian Landscape.
This was also the occasion of a posthumous homage to Professor Harvey Sharrer.
As the convener of this amazing gathering of scholars, I would like to thank every one of our participants for the engaging themes and presentations discussed at that occasion.
These are my opening words of the congress:
I’d like to thank the participants of this congress, most especially during the catastrophic fires that are ravaging Los Angeles, ironically reminding us of the theme of our congress.
I’d like also to thank Pedro Craveiro, Aline de Almeida and Rui Chu for their help, as well as our PASC staff, and most of all, Alyssa Saavedra.
As you all can see in the program, this congress remembers our late colleague Harvey Sharrer, who in a final gesture of generosity left an endowment for our department.
I’m always reluctant to speak about myself (or even my work), especially on such occasions like hosting a congress when it’s for our participants to show their scholarship. But I need to explain the origin and the title of this conference, and why this theme speaks deep to me, and for that, I will have to become personal.
The themes of nature, narrative and landscape are intimately intertwined with my life from a very tender age: my grandmother (from my mother’s side) was an amateur naturalist who taught me the names of plants, both their folk and scientific classifications, but also a deep aesthetic appreciation: “this is an ipomea, or a campanula, because it looks like a little bell” “the name of that tree is flamboyant, see how it really looks to be on fire?”
Landscaping was also very important for my father, and our house, in the middle of a nature starved São Paulo city, was a haven for birds, butterflies, bees and other scampering animals due to the trees he often bought already grown. He once came home excited, put me on the car and zipped to a neighboring district just to observe a palm tree in a new house that we happened to have seen in the Adoration of the Magi by Leonardo da Vinci. Indeed, it was the same!
I spent my childhood in the garden, shaded by fruiting trees and grapevines. It was only natural then, that when in school, in a Latin class translating Tityre, tu patulae recubans sub tegmini fagis, silvestre tenui Musam meditare avena I had found a twin soul in Virgil.
Reading Memórias póstumas de Brás Cubas, however, warned me that Nature is our mother and our enemy. Sou tua mãe e tua inimiga. Nature was Janus like, after all. It didn’t care about us, it only cared about the struggle for existence as we learnt with Darwin, who still loved her, nonetheless. Only later I could tackle the immensity of the contribution of Alexander von Humboldt and his notion of Kosmos. Weren’t the pre-Socratic who came up with the idea of a Cosmo nature? Humboldt’s and Darwin’s descriptions opened for me a new epistemology that could join science and literature, science and art. Can literary descriptions share epistemological paradigms that science cannot provide?
This opened my research into the Naturphilosophie of the German romantics, Schelling, Schiller, Goethe with his Farbenlehre, the French 18th century Romantics, especially Chateaubriand in America, and Buffon, way back to the first descriptions of Brazil by all kinds of travelers, the French, the English, the Germans, the Dutch, the paintings by Albert Eckhout and Frans Post, the pot au beurre of Jean de Léry that (unfortunately perhaps) became Pão de Açúcar; even the nationalization of the Southern Cross, to which Macunaíma took exception: não é nao! É o Pauí Pódole!
It is, finally, this Kosmos that has been part of my life and my research, and now animates the soul of my most recent book Véu da Natureza. Romantismo, Nacionalismo, Modernismo.
I am grateful to our guest speakers for their scholarship and their contributions after I proposed the theme of this congress to them. From views of nature to the realities of climate change and the destruction of such Kosmos, the reflections published here are a real contribution to this important theme.
Thank you very much,
Élide Valarini Oliver
Editor
| Élide Valarini Oliver Professor of Brazilian and Comparative Literature Director of the Center for Portuguese Studies UC Santa Barbara |
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Assistant Editor
| Pedro Craveiro, Ph.D. Lecturer of Spanish and Portuguese UC Santa Barbara pedrocraveiro@ucsb.edu |
Volume 17
Filosofia das pedras: A natureza em Macunaíma entre mito, história e ficção, rumo ao pós-humano, Sonia Netto Salomão (Sapienza Università di Roma)
Na fita de Moebius: A natureza salta da cultura para a barbárie, Suzi Frankl Sperber (Univerdade Estadual de Campinas – UNICAMP)
O sertão como refúgio ambíguo: Alienação e resistência nas narrativas de Graciliano Ramos, Fan Xing (Peking University)
Poesia da natureza – a aclimatação do haiku no Brasil, Paulo Franchetti (Univerdade Estadual de Campinas – UNICAMP)
Formas da paisagem-livro e da paisagem-corpo na poesia brasileira contemporânea, Pablo Simpson (UNESP, São José do Rio Preto)
Natureza dupla em Martim Cererê, Xiaorui Chu (UC Santa Barbara)
Invention, suspicion, and the Amazonian imaginary, Marcos Colón (Arizona State University)
SOS Amazon: The socio-environmental collapse and the urgent call to our generation, Francisco Foot Hardman (Univerdade Estadual de Campinas – UNICAMP)