Aletria: Revista de Estudos de Literatura
Aletria: Revista de Estudos de Literatura is a peer-reviewed journal published every three monsths, sponsored by the Graduate Program in Literary Studies of the School of Letters of the Federal University of Minas Gerais (Brazil) since 1993. It aims to promote scholarly production in the Literary and Cultural Studies area, allowing researchers from Brazil and abroad to share their research and contribute to the academic debate. Aletria continually receives unpliblished works in its field: essays on Literary and Cultural Studies and reviews of literary and cientific works in the field of Literature and Literature Theory. Free of charge.
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The text analyses Eduardo Lourenço’s work, highlighting his relationship with Fernando Pessoa and other authors, such as Macedonio Fernández. Lourenço explores the plurality of identity, emphasizing the unhappy consciousness of modernity, which fails to unite knowledge and action. He argues that literature is a way to inscribe a concept as truth and that cultural experience should be viewed as a continuous process of constructing the self. Other lateral topics as indicated by the critical reflection: the importance of memory in identity formation, and the need for a transcultural perspective to understand reality. Lourenço critiques idealist approaches and proposes a reflection on community and democracy, emphasizing the complexity of cultural relations, especially between Portugal and Brazil.
Dossiê: Eduardo Lourenço, o Brasil e o Impensado Colonial
Copyright (c) 2025 Raúl Antelo (Autor) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Hélène Cixous developed a careful study on the relationship between women, language, and writing, entitled The Laugh of the Medusa. The strangeness of the image, based on the treatment given to the myth of the woman with snakes on her head, is also the feeling we have when thinking about women’s writing. Because of this, Medusa’s laugh is the starting point for discussing the peculiarities of comedy developed by female authors. To illustrate the work with humor and laughter, we looked at the plays Phaedra’s Love, by Sarah Kane, and We Want You to Watch, written by Alice Birch in partnership with RashDash.
Dossiê: A comédia, da formação clássica à modernidade
Copyright (c) 2025 Isa Etel Kopelman, Fernanda Paula Capraro de Toledo (Autor) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
As heranças são um posicionamento. Este pensamento hipercitado de Jacques Derrida não poderia encontrar evidência maior no “Dossiê” temático que aqui se apresenta. A ideia de pensar com (mais do que no) Eduardo Lourenço surgiu inicialmente ligada a uma efeméride (o centenário do nascimento do crítico em 2023). No entanto, a espessura crítica do objeto – um pensamento – tem vindo a coincidir, em paralelo, com uma emersão notável do eixo entre o impensado (uma das grandes diretrizes do pensamento do filósofo português) e o Brasil. Mais do que uma nova construção crítica, foi a força desse pensamento que permitiu recompor uma constelação teórica não só impensada, mas também, de algum modo, inesperada. O que superficialmente poderia parecer apenas uma página biográfica de Lourenço – seu ano como professor na UFBA em Salvador, no final da década de 1950 – revela-se, na verdade, uma força matricial. Essa força reconstrói uma perspectiva crítica que, embora focada em Portugal (o que é óbvio), desvenda – ao ser virada pelo avesso das leituras multiplicadas (ecoando nos ensaios aqui reunidos) – a centralidade do Brasil na construção da própria ideia de impensado.
Copyright (c) 2025 Sabrina Sedlmayer, Margarida Calafate Ribeiro, Roberto Vecchi (Autor) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
A Varia, deste volume 35 e último número da Aletria de 2025, traz uma série de artigos que apresenta uma diversidade temática de trabalhos que potencializam a relevância do periódico no campo dos Estudos Literários desenvolvidos no Brasil.
Copyright (c) 2025 Elen de Medeiros, Marcos Antônio Alexandre (Autor) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
We propose a study of the character Thersites (Homer’s Iliad) as a comic prototype of characters revisited and studied by various poets and theorists. The figure has been identified in numerous texts as a comic double of Achilles (Thalmann, 1988, p. 25 and, apud Lesser, 2023, p. 70; Willcock, 1978, p. 200; Kirk, 1985, p. 139-141; Lowenstam, 1993, p. 78-80; Frade, 2024, p. 16). This article looks at Thersites in terms of the types of behavior described by Theophrastus in Characters and proposes, in order to better typifying the character, a metaplasmic translation Iliad 2, vv. 225-242, i.e. a translation that prioritizes metaplasms and the Greek linguistic variants used by Homer, in order to translate the Greek soldier’s “venting” scene into Brazilian Portuguese.
Copyright (c) 2025 Tereza Virgínia Ribeiro Barbosa (Autor) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
In his history of poetry, Aristotle extols a nowadays obscure poem: the Margites, attributed to Homer. From his point of view, the poem had been a turning point in the development of low style poetry, given its dramatic character and its focus on the ridiculous instead of general criticism. The poem exists only as testimonia and fragments, but its comic poetics shows up both in its plot (which interestingly relates to Aristotle’s poetic theory), and its use of metre and traditional epic phrasing. While telling a low story in an inadequately high style, Margites plays with traditional expectations connected to epic formulas.
Copyright (c) 2025 Tadeu Bruno da Costa Andrade (Autor) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Translaughing George’s Courteline’s L’Ours (1894)
Georges Courteline’s is a famous French comic playwright from the Belle Époque. He wrote numerous vaudevilles and sainetes. Among his comic plays, this article presents the translation of the play L’Ours (1894) with reflections on comic translation in theater (Travaglia, 2003; Vandaele, 2019; Luiz, 2016, 2020, Berman, 1995). To this end, Courteline’s persona, his work, and his importance in such context are introduced. Secondly, the theatrical genres vaudeville and sainete are presented with an in-depth look at the comic elements that make up these literary genres (Barthes, 2020; Dufief, 2001; Geyssant, Guteville, 2000, Razack 2000, Pavis, 2008; Villa Mejía, 2017). At last, the translation is examined and the choices and translation strategies defined and defended are exposed. Thus, this article aims to explore some characteristics of Georges Courteline’s comic theater in translation and to understand how literary knowledge – notably the sainete, the comedy and the stylistics – can be useful to the translator of humorous theatrical texts. The translation of Courteline’s humor (Bornecque, 1969; Morize-Toussaint, Ordas-Piwnik, 2012) is understood as a sensitive and important practice for the execution of his dramatic work in the Brazilian context.
Copyright (c) 2025 Dennys Silva-Reis (Autor) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Publishing Comedies in Brazil from the 1920's to 1940's
The publication of comedies by Brazilian playwrights underwent a significant process of expansion between the 1920s and 1940s. This article analyzes thematic and material forms in exemplary cases of these editions, relating them to the dissemination of cinema and radio, with their impacts on the narrative contents and some scenic resources of such light plays. To this end, the texts and their social inscription, their printed media and the clues of their reading practices will be observed. This highlights the strategies adopted by book and theater agents for insertion and accommodation in the face of the new reality of the entertainment market.
Copyright (c) 2025 Henrique Brener Vertchenko (Autor) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
This article aimed to address the issues of comedy and laughter in the unpublished play O Cíclope (2002), by the Argentinean playwright César Brie. Analyses were conducted based on readings about satirical drama and the strategies for developing the comic element. To this end, we established a dialogue with theorists such as Henri Bergson (1987), Cleise Mendes (2008), Sigmund Freud (2006), Mikhail Bakhtin (2013) and Northrop Frye (2014), in order to formulate a solid and cohesive investigative framework on the issues of laughter and Brie’s dramaturgy. To think about the playwright’s poetics in the Latin American context, we use Brie (2007; 2013a; 2013b), Guimarães (2022a; 2022b) and Rojo (1999; 2016). Consequently, given the complexity of evaluating laughter in its ethical aspect, an evaluative debate was drawn up on the issue itself, a fact that aimed to ease the reading and avoid misunderstandings between the text’s proposal and the reader’s reception. Under this perspective, this article is part of the extensive study we have developed on the ethical and aesthetic aspects of the Argentine playwright’s work.
Copyright (c) 2025 Michel Silva Guimarães, Adilson Santos de Souza (Autor) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Such Serious Stuff as Shakespearian Comedies are Made on
In this article I intend to argue that the comedies of William Shakespeare (1564-1616), albeit historically underprivileged in relation to the author’s tragedies, present, as one of their main features, the ability to promote broad discussions about life in society, sharing in the scope of interests of early modern drama at large, typified as a “drama of institutions” (Barker & Hinds, 2005, p. 8). With such assumption, I will present a general overview of Shakespearian comedies and their subgenres, and then focus on three plays, highlighting in each one what can be understood as a thorough reflection on issues of structural importance to life in society: marriage in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595); desire and its regulation in Twelfth Night, or What You Will (1601); the female question and patriarchy in The Merry Wives of Windsor (1597).
Copyright (c) 2025 Fernanda Medeiros (Autor) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
While she anoints the wounded and centenary skin of her mother, the narrator of Hyperdream, by Hélène Cixous, listens to the story about the purchase of a sommier which used to belong to Walter Benjamin. Benjamin’s sommier that was bought by Ève, the narrator’s mother, escapes from a tragic destiny, despite its former owner, and transmute itself, in the book, into an auratic-object in which the relations are overlapped and interlaced between critical theory and Derridean deconstruction, mourning and dreaming, literature, philosophy and psychoanalysis. In this essay, built alike an inventory, we excavate the story of Benjamin’s sommier and others small objects – erased, forgotten, destroyed. Like a palimpsest, these objects summarize, secretcitatizing the literary memory of Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, Marcel Proust, Hélène Cixous and made the supplementation of the obliteration in the History. Therefore, we’ll demonstrate that when everything is lost, fichu, that is when we start making a scarf out of, fichu, poetry.
Copyright (c) 2025 Francisco Camêlo, Flavia Trocoli (Autor) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Pier Paolo Pasolini in Contemporary Italian Literature
The controversial Italian film-maker and writer has always declared his passion for football. The idea here is to think about how Pier Paolo Pasolini’s emotional and intellectual involvement with this sport got so established in Italian society, that football became the plot of several contemporary literary productions. In order to this, it was necessary to use the methodological procedures of analysis of literature history. The main conclusion was that the passion for football that Pasolini used to feel, associated with his controversial life, made literature incorporate football, sometimes through his ideas, or as a complex character.
Copyright (c) 2025 André Mendes Capraro (Autor) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
O atual número da Aletria: revista de estudos de literatura, periódico ligado ao Programa de Pós-Graduação em Letras: Estudos Literários (PósLit) da UFMG, dedica seu “dossiê” à comédia, gênero literário e teatral que, a despeito de sua força e de suas particularidades estéticas e éticas, tem sido muito pouco abordado nas publicações acadêmicas e, em particular, nos “dossiês” de periódicos especializados do país.
Copyright (c) 2025 Elen de Medeiros, Rodrigo Alves do Nascimento (Autor) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
COSTA, Júlia Morena. O projeto literário de Roberto Bolaño: estética do fracasso. Salvador: EDUFBA, 2023.
Ao pé da letra, uma resenha crítica consiste na descrição analítica de uma obra, ressaltando seu conteúdo, seu estilo e, sobretudo, seu mérito. No entanto, para resenhar O projeto literário de Roberto Bolaño: estética do fracasso, escrito por Júlia Morena Costa e lançado em 2023, não poderei fugir da subjetividade de meu olhar, já que a leitura de sua obra me deslocou como leitora em diversos momentos. Por isso, para além de apresentar, objetivamente, seu livro, me permitirei conversar com a autora, na medida em que falamos de lugares que têm importantes proximidades, assim como distanciamentos.
Copyright (c) 2024 Márcia Paraquett (Autor) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
BURN, Stephen J. Um antídoto contra a solidão: conversas com David Foster Wallace. Tradução de Sarah Grünhagen e Caetano W. Galindo. Belo Horizonte: Âyiné, 2021. 311p.
Um antídoto contra a solidão, livro de entrevistas organizado por Stephen J. Burn – autor também de Infinite Jest: A Reader ́s Guide (2012) –, ajuda-nos não só a compreendermos mais e melhor a literatura produzida por David Foster Wallace, mas a pensarmos com este a respeito da cultura dos EUA, dos caminhos da literatura contemporânea e do sentido da vida. Tudo isso, em maior ou menor medida (a depender de quem o entrevista), com senso de humor ou grande desconforto.
Copyright (c) 2022 Diego Gomes do Valle (Autor) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Copyright (c) 2022 Ewerton Martins Ribeiro (Autor) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
There is a narrative developed since the 21st century about experiences of women who have had to move from one country to another due to contexts of state violence both in Spain and Argentina during the 20th century. This work is focused on the analysis of four conjunctions between nature and uprooting in which a forced displacement underlies or takes place. The corpus is constituted by the following literary texts: Marinka, una rusa niña vasca, by Rodolfo Luna Almeida, Solo queda saltar, by María Rosa Lojo, Estuvimos cantando, by María García Campelo and, within the volume Transterradas. El exilio infantil y juvenil como lugar de memoria, stories from “En tierra de nadie / Todo lo que era mío”, by Marisa González de Oleaga.
Copyright (c) 2022 Mariela Sánchez (Autor) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Literaturas Africanas de Língua Portuguesa
Copyright (c) 2023 Luciana Brandão Leal (Autor) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
LEMOS, Fabiano (org. e trad.). As outras constelações: uma antologia de filósofas do romantismo alemão. Belo Horizonte: Relicário, 2022. 212 p.
As outras constelações: uma antologia de filósofas do romantismo alemão, volume organizado por Fabiano Lemos (professor de Filosofia da UERJ), é publicado em 2022, pela Relicário Edições. O livro, em suas cerca de 200 páginas, reúne um conjunto de textos escritos, entre o final do século XVIII e o começo do XIX, por mulheres ligadas ao Romantismo alemão. A própria constituição fragmentária da antologia dialoga com recursos estéticos caros às escritas da tradição romântica; assim, na medida em que procuro discutir algumas aberturas encontradas na obra, talvez caiba aqui também dialogar esteticamente com a noção de fragmento.
Copyright (c) 2024 Rafael Fava Belúzio (Autor) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
SANTIAGO, Silviano. Grafias de vida – a morte. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2023. 334p.
Silviano Santiago transita entre a teoria e a ficção, há mais de meio século, tendo um trabalho singular e dissonante. Nos ensaios reunidos em Grafias de vida – a morte, o leitor encontrará substancialmente algumas obras da produção nos últimos anos do escritor que, nasceu em Formiga (MG) em 1936 e, em 2021, tornou-se integrante da Academia Mineira de Letras. Silviano Santiago também foi vencedor do Prêmio Camões de 2022.
Copyright (c) 2024 Rodrigo Felipe Veloso (Autor) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
BAJOUR, Cecilia. Cartografia dos encontros: literatura, silêncio e mediação. Tradução de Cícero Oliveira. Lauro de Freitas/BA: Editora Solisluna; São Paulo: Selo Emília, 2023. 184 p.
Em 2012, a editora Pulo do Gato publicou o livro Ouvir nas entrelinhas – o valor da escuta nas práticas de leitura, de Cecilia Bajour. A autora argentina já era bastante conhecida entre os professores preocupados com a formação de leitores no Brasil por suas falas em eventos da área e por sua atuação na Revista Emília.1Nos quatro ensaios que compõem o livro, Bajour se preocupa com a escuta ativa dos mediadores de leitura, vista como um ato democrático, e com a importância da escolha de obras vigorosas e abertas para a sala de aula e para outros espaços formativos.
Copyright (c) 2024 Marcos Vinícius Scheffel (Autor) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Once Upon a Time in Venezuela (2020) The atlas of ruin.
The environmental problem has a close link with political activity. The documentary Once upon a time in Venezuela (2020) by Anabel Rodríguez exhibits this relationship, making the visual story coincide, the political migration crisis in Venezuela and the environmental crisis of a palafitte town that will disappear due to sedimentation. In this article I explain how the conception of the Anthropocene proposed by Maldonado (2016), contrasts with the perspective that Cornil (2017) has of the history of Venezuela and with the Andean "new constitutionalism" that incorporates nature as a legal figure. Didi-Huberman's (2011) notion of an atlas, as visual knowledge, serves to organize the analysis of the anachronistic images of the documentary. The reflections around the images, which make up this atlas proposed by Anabel Rodríguez, lead us to ask ourselves about our critical and creative capacities to “postpone the end of the world” as Ailton Krenak (2019) explains
Dossiê: Literatura, Artes e mídias: Ecocrítica intermidiática
Copyright (c) 2022 JESÚS ARELLANO (Autor) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Paul Bourget contributed to the edification of the literary myth of a provincial Paris in his psychological and high-society novels taking place during the Belle Époque. Describing some provinces areas in the Paris Left Bank, he recounts the Journey of some young provincial men who, as some protagonists in Balzac´s novels, want to conquest Paris and the aristocratic class living in the Bvd Saint-Germain. The author undertakes à shift of the literary myth of Paris which turns out to be fatal for both men who are victims of this uprooting and women who cannot accède the under- allegory of the Parisienne. The foreigners thanks to their Cosmopolitism are the only ones who are not the victims of Parisianism they paradoxically represent the very essence of Paris.
Copyright (c) 2022 Dominique Ancelet-Netter (Autor) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Baudelaire-Paris, Creation of a Perceptive and Phantasmagorical Mythology
Abstract: How did Baudelaire construct the myth of Paris in the mid-19th century? His idealism, incompatible with the industrial and positivist society of the Second Empire, led him to weave new relations between humans and the world to beautify modernity. We’ll first analyze the construction of the myth of Paris from the disenchanted, realistic picture that Baudelaire paints. Then we’ll observe how Baudelaire metamorphosizes urban space. As a response to Haussmann’s dismembered Paris, Baudelaire creates inner landscapes reconstructed by imagination and memory, with the interplay of correspondances forming a mystical cosmology. As the theater of a phantasmagorical scenography, Paris takes on the appearance of a Chimera and acquires a new psychological and poetic density. Finally, we’ll look at the importance of receptive feeling. The reader takes part in the construction of this living myth by an active and emotional reading, thus bestowing on the capital an individual, subjective and universal dimension.
Copyright (c) 2022 Florelle ISAL (Autor) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The Unusual and Secret Paris of Raymond Queneau, seen as a practice of fraternal style
From 1936 to 1938, the writer Raymond Queneau undertook to “seriously” entertain the readers of the daily newspaper L’Intransigeant with a section of questions and answers on Paris, renewed every day. But beyond the literary game, the tireless walker also seeks to dust off and update the modern mythology of the capital, in a format accessible to everyone.
Copyright (c) 2022 Étienne Crosnier (Autor) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The Mode of Enunciation in Beckett’s Plays
This article analyses the question of language and its predicament as it is worked out as something that permeates the construction of the characters in Samuel Beckett’s three main plays: Waiting for Godot, Happy Days and Endgame. It therefore resorts to the analysis of language as containing the approach of the Other that can be understood as the unconscious. Authors such as Theodor W. Adorno and Michael Worton are addressed as they examine the philosophical aspects of the plays and the intersections between nonverbal language and a silent reading of them. The dilemmas of the characters in the three plays, similar to those of modern and contemporary individuals, are analyzed in the context in which the Theatre of the Absurd is inserted. It concludes that Beckett’s use of language reflects new identities that are being formed as it questions reality in its engagement with discourse and the present.
Dossier - Forms of Modern and Contemporary Dramaturgy
Beckett; language; predicament; character; representation; interpretation.
Copyright (c) 2024 Rafael Campos Oliven (Autor) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Copyright (c) 2024 Helmut Galle, Valéria Sabrina Pereira (Autor) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
This article aims to reflect upon the Bildungsroman in the early 20th Century and upon the First World War in Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room. I argue that the formal experimentations with the omniscient narrator and with the protagonist’s characterization allow critical approaches to the individual’s integration into the social realm and to the teleological aspect of the traditional Bildungsroman. With the Great War, the thematic and formal premises of this literary genre radically shifted. In Jacob’s Room, the protagonist’s predetermined death ascertains the novel’s telos (the war) and the impossibility of social integration. In doing so, it questions the very notion of Bildung and the way that reality is represented. In order to discuss these issues, I will focus on the works of Franco Moretti, Judy Little, Gregory Castle and Dorothea E. von Mücke.
Dossiê: James Joyce e Virginia Woolf: Experiências, limites e redefinições do modernismo
Copyright (c) 2025 Júlia Braga Neves (Autor) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
“The alien in our midst”: Henry James through the eyes of Virginia Woolf. For a young woman who “writes” in early twentieth-century England, Henry James is an inescapable and uncomfortable presence, marked by ambivalences – craftsman vs. artificer, adulterer of English conventions vs. conjurer of an immediate old order – an artist about whom she never forgets the mark of difference: the American, even if not entirely so. Through Virginia Woolf’s writings on Henry James, we see a writer aware of the tradition but searching for forms more attentive to the new demands of the material. As this article argues, her reflections illuminate the representational specificity of each one and, perhaps without realizing the exact dimension of the dilemma, they also suggest profound correspondences between realism and modernism, between old experiments and contemporary inquisitions.
Copyright (c) 2025 Marcelo Pen Parreira (Autor) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
“Infinite Discords” in Between the Acts by Virginia Woolf
This article discusses Virginia Woolf’s last novel, Between the Acts (1941), in connection with her ideas about modern fiction and its possible developments after the Second World War. Similarly to Eagleton (2005) and Bakhtin (2014), among other theorists, Woolf saw the novel as a “cannibalistic” form, capable of encompassing all others. Thus, essays such as “Poetry, Fiction and the Future” (1927) and “Phases of Fiction” (1929) demonstrate the author’s interest in investigating the status of fiction in her time and her view that blurring the boundaries between poetry, prose and theater would make it possible to find new ways of representing modern life. Therefore, considering that the resistance to rules and definitions is inherent to the form of the novel, Woolf understood that prose fiction would be the best way to portray the many contradictions of feelings and experiences of the early twentieth-century individuals.
Copyright (c) 2025 Carla Lento Faria (Autor) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0