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First of its kind, this essay collection examines the intellectual trajectory of Latin America's foremost literary critic and dialectician, underscoring its relevance for contemporary debates on world literature. The volume shows how Schwarz's concrete analyses of Brazilian literature and culture offer a theoretical blueprint to understand the literary registration of capitalism's combined and uneven development. Exploring concepts such as misplaced ideas, objective form, and volubility, the contributors show how the nuance of Schwarz's interpretive practice can be productively remodelled into a program for world-literary studies. Throughout the volume, Schwarz's unparalleled contributions to cultural theory, long neglected in the Anglophone academy, are rigorously and creatively debated. Roberto Schwarz and World Literature is a primer on literary criticism as concrete practice and an indispensable book for those interested in how literary form mediates social reality.
List of contents
1. Introduction: Roberto Schwarz and World Literature, T. Waller.- 2. Schwarz's Anatomy, F.A. Durão.- 3. A Quiet (Brazilian) Revolution in Critical Theory, N. Larsen.- 4. Misplacing World Literature, M.E. Cevasco.- 5. Dialectical Criticism in the Provinces of the "World Republic of Letters": The Primacy of the Object in the Work of Roberto Schwarz: Ten Years Later, S.L. López.- 6. Subjective Form: Registration and World Literature, T. Waller.- 7. Presuppositions - Barring Error - of Roberto Schwarz, Antonio Candido, and Georg Lukács, N. Brown.- 8. Structural Reduction in the Early Work of Assaf Gavron, O. Nir.- 9. Fables of Development: Literary Form and the Dialectics of Dependency, M. Niblett.- 10. Displaced Peripheries/Geopolitical Allegories: Roberto Schwarz, Rajinder Singh Bedi, and Colonial Legacies in India, G.S. Sahota.- 11. Reading Modern Chinese Political Economy with Roberto Schwarz, R. Karl.- 12. The Position of the Narrator in the Peripheral Novel: Roberto Schwarz, Machado de Assis and the Problem of Realism, B. Della Torre.- 13. Schwarz's Modernism: Between Artistic Affinity and Intellectual Distance, L. Pasini.- 14. Dual but Combined: Roberto Schwarz and the Sense of the Dialectic, P.E. Arantes, Translated by E. Sauri and T. Waller.
About the author
'Thomas Waller is a Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of English, Drama and Film at University College Dublin, Ireland. He is the author of Genres of Transition: Literature and Economy in Portuguese-Speaking Southern Africa (2024).
Summary
First of its kind, this essay collection examines the intellectual trajectory of Latin America’s foremost literary critic and dialectician, underscoring its relevance for contemporary debates on world literature. The volume shows how Schwarz’s concrete analyses of Brazilian literature and culture offer a theoretical blueprint to understand the literary registration of capitalism’s combined and uneven development. Exploring concepts such as misplaced ideas, objective form, and volubility, the contributors show how the nuance of Schwarz’s interpretive practice can be productively remodelled into a program for world-literary studies. Throughout the volume, Schwarz’s unparalleled contributions to cultural theory, long neglected in the Anglophone academy, are rigorously and creatively debated. Roberto Schwarz and World Literature is a primer on literary criticism as concrete practice and an indispensable book for those interested in how literary form mediates social reality.
