Spring 2005

POR 341 • Luso-Brazilian Civilization and Culture

Course Description

This course is designed to acquaint students with a variety of autobiographical texts in Brazil: travel and journalistic chronicles, letters, private/public diaries, working-class memoirs, or testimonies, autobiographies in prose as well as poetry, some of them written by the major 20th-century Brazilian writers. One of the course's main purposes is to explore the contexts of production and circulation of autobiography in Brazil. In addition, this course will focus on the history of Brazilian autobiographical writing; the question of autobiographical discourse's literary value; the relation between autobiography and history; female autobiographical texts vs. male strategies of self-representation; the subaltern's voice in Brazilian testimonies (testimonial accounts of lives in favelas, or shantytowns, in mental institutions, and in prisons); and political memoirs during Brazilian military dictatorship (1964-85).

Grading Policy

Your grade will be based on: class participation and homework (20%); 3 tests (45%); and 1 final exam (35%).

Texts

Xerox Packet 1 (Primary Readings) Xerox Packet 2/E-Reserve/Blackboard (Secondary Readings)

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