Caligrama: Revista de Estudos Românicos has been published by the Faculty of Letters of the Federal University of Minas Gerais (Brazil) since 1981. Its mission is to promote scientific production in the field of Romance Languages and Literatures, allowing researchers to disseminate their research and contribute to the debate and scientific progress in the area. The journal stands out as one of the few journals focused strictly on the Romance field. Peer Review Process Caligrama: Revista de Estudos Românicos adopts a blind peer review system. The journal follows the guidelines of the COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics) Code of Conduct and Good Practice and submissions must comply with these guidelines. For more information on the Code, see the original text in English or its translation into Portuguese. Any submission that complies with the journal's submission rules and the Code of Conduct and Good Practices will initially be analyzed by the editor-in-chief, who will assess possible problems of authorship (plagiarism, republication, AI, etc.). Cases of possible misconduct will be analyzed according to COPE guidelines. The average evaluation time is 90 days. The evaluators are recruited from among professors with expertise in various areas, from different regions of Brazil, as well as from foreign institutions. Periodicity Published every four months. Open Access Policy This journal offers immediate free access to its content, following the principle that making scientific knowledge freely available to the public provides greater democratization of knowledge.
Maria José de Queiroz, artesã da palavra
Copyright (c) 2025 Lyslei Nascimento https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Maria José de Queiroz between Paths and Ink of America
Emphasizing the qualities of her style and linguistic practice, Pedro Nava defined Maria José de Queiroz as an “artist and craftswoman of the word”. One of the rare Brazilian writers to be labeled, sometimes unflatteringly, “erudite”, this writer, whose vast body of work encompasses essays, poetry, and fiction, spanning teaching and writing, has built, throughout her career, an important segment of contemporary literature and literary criticism.
Beginning with an initial reflection on some of the most significant aspects of Sebastião Uchoa Leite’s poetry, based on demetaphorizing, humorous and ironic procedures, this article turns to the poet’s work to investigate how his poetry, suspicious and separated from certain torrent of lyrical emotion, is related to the figurations of illness and to the corrosion of the body, especially in A uma espreita (2000) and A regra secreta (2002). To do so, the article relies on a close reading of poems in which the limit experience of illness emerges in greater depth and in more sneaky, dizzying and self-investigative way. Finally, the 1995 poem “Minha (anti)boêmia” is analyzed, a text published in an inedited way in the magazine Ouriço (2021), demonstrating how the mechanisms of self-investigation suggest, for the poet, the affirmation of life and the maintenance of lucidity.
Copyright (c) 2025 Leonardo Leal https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The House of the Alferes in Joaquina, Daughter of Tiradentes, by Maria José de Queiroz
This article aims to analyze, in Joaquina, daughter of Tiradentes, by Maria José de Queiroz, a novel published in 1987, the figure of Joaquina, the natural daughter of Joaquim José da Silva Xavier, seeking to glimpse, in this biographical account, from a character silenced by official history, a panoramic image of Brazilian history and the ruin of one of its martyrs, Tiradentes. In the course of the novel, after escaping the disastrous fate of the inconfidente, Joaquina and her mother move between numerous houses, spaces that provide them with shelter and protection, but that also represent the various nuances that make up the society of the time and, at the same time, engender the contrast between the ruined and salty house of Tiradentes, so that nothing else grows there, including his descendants, and the dwellings inhabited by the surviving women. Thus, the main intention of this article was, based on this biographical archive, to present the story of Tiradentes’ daughter, her parents and the ruined house of Tiradentes, whose own descendants had been erased from official history, leaving, through the literary work of Maria José de Queiroz, the narrative of Joaquina.
Copyright (c) 2025 André de Souza Pinto https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Maria José de Queiroz and the Poetic Cartography of the Soul of Minas Gerais
The poetry of Minas Gerais occupies a unique space in Brazilian literature, marked by introspection, melancholic musicality and an intimate relationship with memory and time. Within this tradition, Maria José de Queiroz stands out for her writing that articulates memoirist lyricism, nostalgia for the lost past, structuring her work as a true ritual of evocation and resistance, as well as the “exercise of the spinner”, that is, the act of spinning being an artifice of poetic construction and creation. This article proposes to analyze how the author from Minas Gerais incorporates, in her poetry, personal and collective memory as ritual elements of identity preservation, while her literary voice is intertwined with the cultural heritage of Minas. It is intended to analyze and critically substantiate the relationship between poetry, Minas Gerais identity and memory present in the poems “Minas Além do Som, Minas Gerais” and “Minas Gerais, Estados d’alma”, from the book Como me contaram... fábulas historiais (1973) and, in addition, from the poem “Três à mesa”, from the book Desde longe (2016). To this end, authors such as Lyslei Nascimento (1995; 2020), Melânia Silva de Aguiar (2007), Pierre Nora (1993), Arnold Van Gennep (2011), among others, are used.
Copyright (c) 2025 Rodrigo Felipe Veloso https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Grotesque and Excessiveness in My Fate is to Sin, by Nelson Rodrigues
Nelson Rodrigues is famous for his exploration of psychological, mythical and social aspects of his characters. They are usually unable to control their affections and their drives. This often results in attitudes, speeches, behaviors and even physical appearances marked by grotesque and excessiveness. These aspects, which are at the heart of his aesthetic, made him famous as a playwright, novelist, and short story writer. In his serial narratives, however, Rodrigues takes grotesque and excessiveness to a paroxysm, keeping the tension of his narrative at the utmost until the appeasing outcome, typical of that genre. This article focuses on Rodrigues’s first serial narrative, showing its peculiarities and its coherence with the author’s literary conceptions.
Copyright (c) 2025 Adriano de Paula Rabelo https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Maria José de Queiroz and the Liveliness of Contemporary Narratives
Maria José de Queiroz is a writer from Minas Gerais who began publishing critical essays, novels, verses, short stories and two works of children’s literature at a very young age. Critics familiar with her work consider her to be a great contemporary writer, especially due to the vivacity of her poetic images and characters – aspects that will be presented in this article that analyzes the narratives of her book Amor Cruel, Amor Vingador (1996/2021), specifically the five short stories: “O Juramento”, “Velho com mulher moça”, “Iniciação ao Tratado do esperança”, “Ritinha-Chiquê ou A hora do carvoeiro” and “A morte ao pé da letra”. In her plots, the writer develops female characters who resist/or try to resist silencing, sexism and social prejudices. Our research consists of critical-theoretical, deductive and analytical bibliographic research, based on discussions by authors such as Maria Lúcia Barbosa (2018), Christini Roman de Lima (2021), among others. This research investigated love and hate in the short stories by Maria José de Queiroz mentioned above, which deal with enigmatic suspense stories, simulating police plots, delving into the description of marginalized classes - for example, women marked by the need to belong to the literary universe in a patriarchal society.
Copyright (c) 2025 Jaciane Muniz de Aguiar, Rita de Cássia Silva Dionísio Santos https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The Writing of Intimacy in Fragments… d’Enfance by Bernoussi Saltani
This contribution will analyze the writing of intimacy in Bernoussi Saltani’s Fragments… d’enfance. It will begin by evoking the story of childhood through the life of a narrator-author. The narrator recalls memories marked by painful ordeals, but also by moments of joy. By bringing childhood back to life, a whole section of Moroccan history is rehabilitated. By alternating between different registers, the narrator-author takes the reader on a journey to his most intimate place, his inner life. It also reveals a series of trials that the narrator has undergone, trials that have made him an open-minded man. Although painful, these trials have nonetheless contributed to his maturity, which is reflected in his quest for humanism. The narrator also problematizes the notion of racism, which begins in small society (the family) and reaches out to big society. He calls into question political and social racism, while appealing to a politics of love and hospitality by recalling the cohabitation of different cultures throughout history. Understanding the present depends on understanding the past. As a song of orality, Saltani’s narrative-remembrance-nostalgia is a hymn to love for the other. His writing, tinged with humor and irony, favors a reflective and anecdotal aesthetic, encouraging the reader to reflect on the world from the experience of intimacy.
Copyright (c) 2025 Abdelouahed Hajji https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The present paper aimed to examine four elements of the physical space in Madame Bovary through the perspective of affection and the characters’ psychological space, analysing the space based on Bachelard and Weisgerber and the tones of the narrator and Emma’s speech, from a bakhtinian approach. Thus, it was demonstrated that the characters’ vision influences the description of the studied spaces through the narrator’s speech. Four spaces from the novel were chosen: (i) the house in Tostes; (ii) the castle of La Vaubyessard; (iii) the house in Yonville; and, finally, (iv) the room in Hôtel de Boulogne. These interferences manifest themselves because of the protagonist’s emotions, which were reflected in the narrator’s lexical choices, among which the analysis focused mainly on the house/home dichotomy (sa/ma maison e chez elle/chez nous). Therefore, it was concluded that the manner in which the spaces are described is permeated by the characters’ feelings and perceptions, especially those of Emma Bovary.
Copyright (c) 2025 Laís Marx Umpierre, Luísa Freire https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
This article introduces the concept of multimodality, discussed from two main perspectives: the metatheoretical, which understands multimodality as a field of inquiry into the production of meaning through multiple semiotic forms; and the phenomenological, which views it as the integration of different expressive modalities (speech, gesture, image, among others) in communicative practices. Based on this conceptual foundation, the text highlights the historical lack of attention to multimodality in the fields of Linguistics and Computer Science, reflected in theoretical and computational models that favor isolated and conventionalized linguistic forms. In response to these challenges, the article presents projects developed within the scope of ReINVenTA, a research network dedicated to the construction and annotation of multimodal datasets based on Frame Semantics, aiming to integrate cognitive linguistics and computational models. The conclusion emphasizes the need for interdisciplinary approaches that recognize language as a social, interactional, and inherently multimodal phenomenon.
Copyright (c) 2025 Tiago Timponi Torrent, André V. Lopes Coneglian https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Refractions in Literary Time in Maria José de Queiroz Fiction
This article examines part of Maria José de Queiroz’s work, with the focus on different ways of manifesting time. There were selected the novels Homem de sete partidas (Queiroz, 1980) and Sobre os rios que vão (Queiroz, 1990), the short story “O julgamento” (The judgement), which is inserted in the book Amor cruel, amor vingador (Queiroz, 1996a), and the children’s book O chapéu encantado (Queiroz, 1998), in order to identify some temporal issues of these fictions. The study uses as a theoretical support the essay of the same author, named Refrações no tempo (Queiroz, 1996b), as well as texts by Roland Barthes (1987), Alfonso Martin Jiménez (1989), Edward Morgan Forster (2005), Jacques Derrida (2012), Chris Sinha and Enrique Bernárdez (2015). The conclusion is that Queiroz’s style shows linguistic, semantic and historical-culture characteristics of temporal aspects that contribute to generate dramatic effects.
Copyright (c) 2025 Ana Cecília Estellita Lins https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Neste artigo, proponho uma extensão dos modelos de cena de atenção conjunta para incluir cenários comunicativos multimodais mediados. A partir dessa extensão, discuto como o modelo analítico da FrameNet pode ser usado para a anotação de gêneros multimodais, de modo a incluir categorias capazes de explicar as mudanças convidadas na atenção conjunta em narrativas visuais. Revisito a literatura sobre dêixis e afirmo que, apesar de grande parte da pesquisa fundamental sobre esse tópico propor correlações entre dêixis na linguagem verbal e outros modos semióticos, o foco da pesquisa está no material linguístico no qual a expressão de dêixis está fundamentada. Ao reunir contribuições dos estudos de comunicação humana, da análise de dêixis em narrativas e da Semântica de Frames, proponho que dispositivos semióticos de diferentes tipos podem ser mobilizados em narrativas fílmicas para convidar os espectadores a promover mudanças no centro da cena de atenção conjunta. Para ilustrar a tipologia proposta, apresento exemplos de análises de deslocamentos do centro dêitico em filmes e descrevo a metodologia de anotação incorporada ao modelo FrameNet para explicar esses deslocamentos.
Multimodalidade: abordagens cognitivas e representações computacionais
Copyright (c) 2025 Natália Sathler Sigiliano https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Multimodal representations of content in the journalistic genre
This article examines the benefits and challenges of expanding the ReINVenTA dataset to include multimodal journalistic genres, exploring the specificities and relationships between visual and textual elements in this new genre while aiming to enhance the semantic representation of multimodal data in the existing database. Two new corpora are proposed: one corpus consisting of journalistic images and texts and another corpus focused on television news broadcasts, particularly news reports. The methodology involves the automatic extraction and labeling of visual and textual data, complemented by human validation to ensure accuracy and mitigate biases, as well as the integrated annotation of spoken audio and images from audiovisual journalistic content, considering the peculiar characteristics of the genre.
Copyright (c) 2025 Frederico Belcavello, Marcelo Viridiano https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Semantic Permanence between Original Audio and Subtitles
Based on Frame Semantics (Fillmore, 1982) and the Frame Primacy Model (Czulo, 2013), this study performs a multimodal analysis of the sentences transcribed from the Portuguese original audio, the English subtitles and the images corresponding to the first six minutes of the Brazilian short film Eu não quero voltar sozinho (“I Don’t Want to Go Home by Myself”), by Daniel Ribeiro. This research aims to investigate the semantic similarity between the frames evoked in their equivalent sentences, evaluate the translation choices and analyze the semantic relations established between text and image. It adopts the FrameNet Brasil methodology for multimodal semantic annotations on the Webtool platform, and the semantic similarity between frames is calculated using the spread activation algorithm and the soft cosine similarity metric. The measures organize the sentences in null, partial or total similarity, as proposed by Samagaio (2023). The subtitling translation strategies are analyzed according to Díaz-Cintas and Remael (2021) and evaluated in terms of the semantic relations between text and image. Our results show that the translation strategies employed alter the evocation of frames in the languages analyzed, impacting the semantic similarity between sentences. This study contributes to the field of audiovisual translation and to Frame Semantics, by exploring the construction of meaning in multimodal objects and demonstrating how translation strategies influence the relationship between text, image and evoked frames.
Copyright (c) 2025 Mariana Mota Silva Souza, Maucha Andrade Gamonal, Adriana Silvina Pagano https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Grammar in multimodal datasets: a case-study of image captions
This article presents a linguistic study of a sample of 150 image captions from the multimodal dataset Framed Multi30k (Viridiano, 2024). The objective is to analyze image captions based on socio-cognitive factors involved in the process of verbalizing experience (Chafe, 2002, 2005; Croft, 2007), in order to partially explain the variation observed in the lexico-grammatical construction of captions. To this end, the article discusses a computational methodology for linguistic annotation of captions, which serves as the basis for extracting grammatical information. Additionally, it examines the experimental nature of controlled elicitation in caption production and its linguistic implications. The grammatical analysis focuses on verbalization processes, such as selection, categorization, and orientation. Finally, the study explores the nature of image captions as descriptive textual units, highlighting descriptive operations observed in their production.
Copyright (c) 2025 André V. Lopes Coneglian, Adriana Pagano https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Uma abordagem da FrameNet Brasil para anotação de frames pragmáticos evocados por gestos deorganização de turno
Este artigo apresenta como a FrameNet Brasil desenvolveu a anotação de frames pragmáticos, com foco nos que são evocados por gestos interativos usados ​​na organização de turnos durante conversas face a face. Como corpus, escolhemos as entrevistas mostradas nos episódios da primeira temporada da série de televisão brasileira Pedro Pelo Mundo. Utilizamos a Webtool 4.0, a versão mais nova dessa ferramenta, para anotação de um total de 47 gestos interativos. Como resultado, fomos capazes de demonstrar que esses gestos interativos evocam frames pragmáticos específicos – passagem de turno, confirmação de turno e tomada de turno – e são ferramentas que tornam a conversa um meio multimodal de comunicação. Nossa pesquisa mostra que a anotação de frames pragmáticos não é apenas possível, mas também útil para investigações pragmáticas e para expandir a análise multimodal da FrameNet.
Copyright (c) 2025 Helen de Andrade Abreu, Ely Edison da Silva Matos https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
This study analyzes the reasons why the standard grammars of European Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese diverge regarding the conjugation of verbs ending in -iar. It is observed that, while vowel alternation between -i-/-ei- is widely accepted in many verbs in Portugal, in Brazil this variation is normatively restricted to only six cases. Grammars, orthographic manuals, and dictionaries were analyzed to determine when these variations were first recorded and how grammarians and scholars of that time received these new forms. The study concludes that the difference between the dialects is due to the loss of contrast between the pretonic vowels /e/ and /i/ in the context of the first vowel of a hiatus in Portugal, causing greater confusion between conjugations, whereas Brazil maintained the contrast of pretonic front vowels. Moreover, there was a shift in the Brazilian standard grammar during the 20th century, aiming to distinguish Brazilian Portuguese from European Portuguese, which was reflected in the rejection of the -i-/-ei- alternation in most verbs. Therefore, the difference in the evolution of this alternation phenomenon between the varieties of Portugal and Brazil is not merely a phonological issue but also a normative one.
Copyright (c) 2025 Lucas Pereira Eberle https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Copyright (c) 2024 Caligrama: Revista de Estudos Românicos
In addition to exploring the editorial genre Porte-feuille, primarily through French cases from the 18th century, this article discusses three practices that highlight how the book functions as an object capable of containing different material elements: “Printed materials within printed texts” particularly addresses the presence of engravings and maps; “Scribal texts in printed books” reveals a fascinating universe of erasable pages introduced within printed books for notes and personal comments; “Things lost in books” uncovers the relationship between the reader and the objects that accompany the reading experience. These categories not only discuss the multifunctionality of the book but also emphasize the cultural and historical significance of preserving the forms of texts and other materials contained within them.
Dossiê: Materialidade dos textos e transmissão literária
Copyright (c) 2024 Caligrama: Revista de Estudos Românicos https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Despite the prestige still enjoyed today by the publishing house he founded, Bernard Grasset has never fully escaped, since his death, the “national indignity” to which he was condemned in 1948 for collaboration during World War II. In this text, we revisit his case not to take a position for or against the rehabilitation of the figure in French national memory, but to demonstrate through his example that practices, discourses, and representations form the different facets of the same editorial mediation.
Copyright (c) 2024 Caligrama: Revista de Estudos Românicos http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The Materiality of the Book in the Graphic-Independent Microcosm
The purpose of this paper is to analyze the ways in which the materiality of the book is operated by publishing houses in the graphic-independent microcosm. Based on reflections about the book and its materiality, we analyzed three copies belonging to the publishing houses Polvilho Edições, Editora Barbante and negalilu editora. The analysis focused on the graphic design of the works, considering their production context and possible developments. Our conclusions are that the material work with print carried out by the publishers brings together literary genres, forms of language and media, showing that experimentation brings out new possibilities for literary transmission.
Our aim is to contextualize and analyse two articles by the Portuguese poet Luís de Montalvor, which refer to the materiality of books as well as some other works published in the Portuguese press in the 1940s. Montalvor’s first article was published in Panorama magazine in 1943, an edition of the National Propaganda Secretariat created in Portugal in 1933. The second was published in the magazine Seara Nova (1944). Published at the same time, they were both given the same title “The art of the book” by their author. Our proposal is to assess how the author understood the materiality of texts, using the metaphors of architecture and poetry as an opportunity to think about the Portuguese publishing market in the 1940s. Our hypothesis is that Luís de Montalvor contributed to understanding the role of the material condition of texts by defending typography as a fundamental resource for publishing in that context. Luís de Montalvor’s reflections highlight the place and relevance of the material condition of printed matter, considering art to be the appanage of the book. For contextualization purposes, we have tried to highlight some articles and works published in the Portuguese press on the same theme: the materiality of texts and publishing production. We have also chosen some academic works that have taken typography as an object of study in contemporary times, and which therefore help us to understand the previously mentioned production scenario of Montalvor’s writings.
Reading and Poetics in Printed Literary Games at the Turn of the 20th Century
Long-lasting phenomena, literary games such as riddles, logogriphs and anagrams have their origin in distant narratives and cultural practices that precede its records in classical antiquity. Traces and fragments of these eccentric and dialogic microforms can be easily found in popular culture and the digital environment, indicating its survival and contemporary relevance. Since games have as their subject matter the language itself, we will try to demonstrate how they stimulate linguistic and media self-awareness simultaneously. In this sense, we used computational tools to track and compare the publication of these games in digital libraries with collections of the French and Brazilian press, identifying their significant popularization at the end of the nineteenth century. We assume this large quantitative increase as a cut to analyze qualitative changes in the games, from a detailed analysis of some examples that demonstrate some of the difficulties of adaptation and translation of literary games in different cultural and linguistic realities. Finally, we will try to demonstrate how the printed literary games developed a poetic media of their own, as well as a particular reading form that relates to the material conditions of the press itself.
The modern system of text classification was consolidated between the 17th and 19th centuries, marked by the standardization of bibliographic codes and the distinct identity of the book as a volume. This established system has shaped the history of text transmission, often overlooking how changes in organization and attribution influence creation and circulation. The article begins by synthesizing the relationship between bibliographic classification practices and the criteria for writing fiction, whether in the form of Belle-Lettres or what would eventually be recognized as literature. Next, it explores the impact of materiality on the symbolic status of texts, divided into two parts. The first part examines a significant transition that began in the mid-17th century: the shift from a system dominated by miscellanies and reader-organized compilations to a bibliographic framework centered on single-author volumes, establishing a clear connection between author, title, and work. In the second part, we analyze how, by the 19th century, literature—with the rise of the novel, the emergence of nationalisms, and the evolving figure of the author—manifests itself on the surface of books, influencing both the publishing market and in the world of collecting.
“I Donate all my Manuscripts” or the Two Bodies of the Writer
In the famous 1881 codicil to his testament, Victor Hugo gave to the Bibliothèque nationale “everything that will be discovered written or drawn” by him. This gesture is truly founding, as its direct consequence would be the foundation of the Department of Modern Manuscripts, and its indirect consequence the very existence of genetic criticism. But it was also the result of a long process, which, in Victor Hugo’s mind, made of his manuscripts a treasure to be preserved similarly to historical monuments. This corpus, available and protected, meant to survive the author, gives form, so to speak, to the glorious form of his biological and perishable body. If Hugo so patiently constructed, against all odds, the symbolic edifice of a work re-established in its autographic authenticity, it was to hand it down intact to posterity, with all its unpublished texts, as a store of meaning giving access not only to the texts but also to writing itself.
Materiality and Visuality of Literature in an Argentine Advertising Campaign (1917)
The objective of this article is to investigate multiple intersections between literature, visuality and wide circulation in a literary and advertising iconotext that circulated in three of the main newspapers in Argentina in 1917. Based on a theoretical framework coming from the studies on Visual culture, the Cultural history of the press and Bibliology, the relationship between literature and the materiality and visuality of the page is analyzed within the framework of an advertising campaign. The article focuses on three issues, the first is the relationship between literature and image; The second is the implications of the intersections between text, materiality and visuality for literature and for newspaper readers; The third question is about the practices that these links could generate in the reading public.
This text evaluates the impact caused by reading the manuscript of Um sopro de vida, by Clarice Lispector, invoking the notion of production of presence formulated by Hans Gumbrecht. The movement of writing and the undisciplined nature of the autograph folios contrast with the editorial fixity of the book. As it is a posthumous publication, not only the status of Olga Borelli’s participation is questioned, but also the occasional omission of credits for this participation. A comparison is made between some editions of Um sopro de vida with the purpose of examining variations and constants. In the end, the importance of the work to be carried out in order to materialize different editions is highlighted. Those editions ought to preserve the fragmentary and incomplete character of the book, coming closer to Clarice’s writing movement.
Technodiversity and Bibliodiversity in Book and Publishing Studies
The notion of technodiversity has been proposed and discussed by the Chinese philosopher Yuk Hui and concerns what he also treats as fragmentation, in a positive sense, that is, the importance of having technological diversity in our repertoires of practices with technologies, the so that we can avoid excessive standardization and even the homogenization of resources, as we already see happening in the relationship with big techs and digital platforms. Hui defends technodiversity (name of his book in Brazil), including its predecessor technologies, in a fundamentally diverse range that can be managed by people who make also different uses of resources, according to different contexts, opportunities and contingencies. The idea that there needs to be a counterflow to standardization is not new and can be associated, in the case of book studies, with the notion of bibliodiversity, discussed from that of multiversity, by Susan Hawthorne, a few decades ago (in her book with the same title). This article, of a theoretical and essayistic nature, seeks an articulation between the notions of cosmotechnics, technodiversity, fragmentation, multiversity and bibliodiversity, outlining possible approaches for the book studies, reading and their technological, material and practical diversity.
From Written Text to Sound Performance, from Printed Book to Audiobook
This study, part of a broader doctoral research project in a multipaper format, centers on audiobooks and their many manifestations through the framework of the Intermedial Studies, as well as related and complementary theoretical perspectives. The objective is to investigate how the same literary text can be transmediated through the integration and combination of readers’ sound performances with music and sound effects, when applicable. The research seeks to underscore the complexity and versality of audiobooks in their multisemiotic nature and intermedial capabilities. To facilitate a deeper analysis, three case studies are explored: Alice no País das Maravilhas by Lewis Carroll, Memórias póstumas de Brás Cubas by Machado de Assis, and O pequeno príncipe by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. These works were selected due to their public domain status and the extensive range of audiobook versions available. The study proposes different hypotheses regarding the variations among audiobook types, concluding with a reflective discussion on the necessity of a classification system that considers sound performance, music, and sound effects. Through this analysis, the research aims to contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of the nuances and potential of this auditory media.
In 1982 a survey of contemporary Argentine literature was published: Encuesta a la literatura argentina contemporánea, a volume of more than 500 pages that gathers the answers of 65 writers (narrators, poets, playwrights) and 19 literary critics. The context of production of that book is significant since the dark years of the military dictatorship had not yet ended then. The survey consists of 9 questions, ranging from the beginnings of writing, the family and intellectual climate at home, formal and informal education, literary groups and friendships, to the central themes that run through their texts, the representation of an ideal reader, and the survival jobs the authors have done while writing. It is an exceptional document for the study of literary life and of writers’ representations of their own work. In this case, we will deal with the material conditions of literature production, from “How do you work?” to “What do you live on?”; from the possibilities of writing literature to the possibilities of making a living from that writing.