Jobst Welge

The essay analyzes a collection of " war chronicles " by the Brazilian writer Rubem Braga (1913-1990), one of his country's most famous literary journalists. The collection, entitled Com a FEB na Itália (1945), relates Braga's experiences while working as an " embedded journalist " during the campaign of the so-called " Brazilian Expeditionary Force " in Italy during the last two years of the Second World War. The essay briefly rehearses the historical context regarding Brazil's involvement in the war on the side of the American Allied Forces. More specifically, it disscusses how the literary form of the chronicle (crônica) is employed by Braga to report not only on the factual military proceedings, but to reflect upon the " inter-cultural " encounter between Brazilians and Italians, the uncanny parallels between the regimes of Benito Mussolini and Getúlio Vargas, as well as the relations between Brazil and the United States. Ultimately, Braga's texts embody, both in form and content, the condition of the writer as a " traveller " in war, his rhetoric of patriotism, but also his role as an observer and mediator of cultural/ national difference. iiiiiiiiiubem Braga (1913-1990) is generally recognized as the iiiiiiiiigreatest practitioner of the very Brazilian genre of the crônica (" chronicle "), and he is habitually included in any list of great Brazilian writers, despite the fact that he practiced this brief, para-literary form to the exclusion of other genres. According to Davi Arrigucci, Jr., the crônica, a type of familiar essay in which fact and fiction, journalism and literary narrative, are often inseparable, is distinguished in Braga's hands by the emergence of an epiphanic moment that breaks through the surface of the everyday, a moment of interior reflection that contrasts with the exterior events depicted in the format of the daily newspaper where the crônica was first published. 1 Part of the literary effect of this hybrid genre, then, derives from the medium in which it (first) appears. The origin of the Brazilian crônica can be traced to the year 1836, when R

Das Werk zahlreicher italienischer Schriftsteller ist nicht zu denken ohne den Bezug auf spezische geographische Regionen. Und doch gibt es kaum einen Autoren der Moderne, dessen Name so eng mit einer Region, zu-mal mit einer Berg-Region verknüpft ist, wie Mario Rigoni Stern. Rigoni Sterns gesamtes erzählerisches Werk kreist um seine Heimatgegend nord-westlich von Vicenza in den venetischen Vorderalpen, das Altipiano dei Sette Comuni, auch Altipiano di Asiago genannt nach seinem Hauptort, der kleinen Stadt Asiago, in der Rigoni Stern geboren wurde und in der er auch gestorben ist – die restlichen der »Sieben Gemeinden« tragen die Namen Roana, Rotzo, Lusiana, Enego, Gallio und Foza. Diese Verwurzelung ist aber nur die Kehrseite einer Entfernung und Entwurze-lung, die ursprünglich durch den Krieg ausgelöst wurde. Das Hochplateau der italienischen Alpen, eine lange Zeit praktisch autonome Grenzregion, die seit Teil Österreich-Ungarns war und schließlich dem italie-nischen Nationalstaat zugeschlagen wurde, war seit der Schauplatz schwerer Gefechte zwischen italienischen und österreichischen Truppen, wobei der Ort Asiago, einschließlich des Elternhauses von Rigoni Stern, nahezu ganz zerstört wurde. Die Ereignisse sind festgehalten in einer der wichtigsten literarischen Kriegserinnerungen der italienischen Literatur, Un anno sull'Altipiano von Emilio Lussu (/ verfasst, in Italien erschienen). Trotz des Altersunterschiedes war Rigoni Stern mit Lussu befreundet, sowie auch mit einem anderen berühmten Kriegsfreiwilligen, Piero Jahier, Autor des Tagebuchs Con me e con gli alpini (). Rigoni Stern hatte sich als junger Idealist freiwillig bei der Mili-tärschule der alpinisti in Aosta gemeldet, mit der Spezialisierung als Berg-steiger und Skiläufer. In einer späteren Erzählung (»Un raid tra le nevi«) erinnert er sich daran, wie seine Generation in einem durch die Heroisie-rung des Ersten Weltkrieges geprägten Klima heranwuchs und fügt hinzu: »Aber auch die Ski-Wettläufe, die Exkursionen in den heimatlichen Bergen, wo der Krieg jeden Meter geprägt hatte, die ersten Versammlungen der

The employee as a typical figure of modernity has been represented as a specific type of literary anti-hero since the nineteenth century. Italo Svevo's early novel, Una vita (1982, A Life), is an example that is strongly related to the theme of the anti-hero in the French novel of disillusion, as well as to the fin-de-siécle concern with an incapacitated, dilettante protagonist, unable to act and live. In light of Svevo's own misgivings about the profession of writing fiction, the novel reflects on the relation between literature and life, by way of an uprooted individual who finds himself ill at ease in the anonymous, competitive world of modernity. The subject of Svevo's novel, the arrival of a provincial, petit-bourgeo-is intellectual to a semi-provincial city, may also be found in a somewhat later Brazilian novel, O amanuense Belmiro (The amanuensis Belmiro, 1937) by Cyro dos Anjos. Aside from parallels of plot, social, and geographical setting, which are grounded in the experience of modernity in different contexts, the two novels may be said to model a new kind of author-function, as well as a specific form of a non-linear, self-reflexive novel. I Angestellte als Anti-Helden der Moderne Der Ich-Erzähler in Herman Melvilles Erzählung Bartleby, The Scrivener (1853) ist ein auf der Wall Street residierender Anwalt, der von der passiven Widersetzlich-keit seines Angestellten Bartleby sowohl irritiert als auch fasziniert ist. Gleich eingangs bemerkt der Erzähler, dass die interessante und etwas seltsame Gruppe der Anwalts-Kopisten ein bislang wenig erforschtes Objekt abgibt, wodurch seine Geschichte also einen gewissen Neuheitswert beansprucht. Gleichzeitig gesteht der Erzähler aber ein, dass die dokumentarische Quellenlage für eine Biografie

M a c h a d o d e A s s is ' E saú e J acó and the Problem of Historical Representation J o b s t W e lg e Este estudo propõe ler Esaú e Jacó (1904), de Machado de Assis, como uma desconstrução do romance realista/histórico tradicional através do uso de um forte componente alegórico. Como o romance reflete uma postura cé­ tica acerca do conceito da nação, especialmente da ideia de uma transição político-histórica da Monarquia para a República no Brasil, a leitura mos­ trará que Esaú e Jacó pode ser entendido como uma interrogação do próprio conceito de representação histórica, nacional e literária. No plano formal do texto, isto se revela através da preocupação explícita com questões de tempo e narração; no nível temático, evidencia-se por diferentes motivos relaciona­ dos com 0 problema da descontinuidade genealógica e familiar. A trama do romance—a rivalidade entre os irmãos gêmeos Pedro e Paulo na disputa do amor da jovem Flora—serve como ilustração " alegórica " da falta de identifica­ ção com a jovem República brasileira, mas também transcende esse contexto histórico. / \ t the beginning of the twentieth century, Machado de Assis' late novel Esaú e Jacó (1904) presents an extreme case of the impossibility, or negation of the realist narration of nationhood, in favor of a more directly allegorical mode of representation, or in any case a mode where realist and allegorical elements coexist, a characteristic feature of Machados prose insisted upon by John Gledson (1986). While this novel shares a number of different stylistic and thematic features with the other novels of Machados so-called second phase (after 1880), arguably this is the one novel by Machado that more than any other is concerned with history. Of course, there is an influential tradi­ tion of criticism that has insisted on the historical referentiality of practically

Resumo: O romance Angústia de Graciliano Ramos foi caracterizado como " existencialista avant la lettre " (A. Bosi); na crítica brasileira, Angústia é geralmente discutido no contexto de um certo " romance de urbanização " ou de uma linha brasileira de " romance intimista. " A presente contribuição pretende demonstrar detalhadamente o quanto o romance deve a uma herança dostoievskiana, e indicar o quanto partilha com outros textos latino-americanos nessa linhagem " existencialista. " Isso inclui aspectos formais, narrativas e temáticas, como a forma confissão, a autorrepresentação de uma subjetividade solipsista à margem da loucura, o homicídio/crime como afirmação de pulsões obscuras e moralmente problemáticas ao lado da prática de arte/escritura. Mais especificamente, quero analisar como Angústia ganha complexidade psicológica através de uma representação da interioridade, servindo-me de estudos sobre a figuração de processos mentais no romance moderno – e como esta interioridade patológica corresponde a uma experiência específica da modernidade. Palavras-chave: Angústia. Dostoievski. Existencialismo. Abstract: The novel Angústia has been characterized as " existentialist avant la lettre " (A. Bosi). In Brazilian criticism, this novel if often discussed in the context of the so-called " novel of urbanization, " or within the lineage of the psychological novel. The present contribution seeks to demonstrate the novel's indebtedness to the legacy of Dostoiewski, as well as its general similarity to other Latin American texts in an " existentialist " mold. This includes formal, 1 Professor Visitante de Teoria de Cultura e Metodologias de Estudos Culturais na Universidade de Konstanz (Alemanha). Tem vários trabalhos sobre literatura brasileira, italiana e ibero-americana. Um estudo comparativo sobre o romance moderno, incluindo vários exemplos lusófonos, Genealogical Fictions: Cultural Periphery and Historical Change in the Modern Novel, será publicado pela Johns Hopkins University Press (Baltimore, 2014). O presente artigo faz parte de um projeto atual sobre " Sujeitos deslocados no romance brasileiro ". " Como em Caetés e São Bernardo, a narrativa está na primeira pessoa; mas só aqui podemos falar propriamente em monólogo interior, em palavras que não visam o interlocutor e decorrem de necessidade própria " (CANDIDO, 1992, p. 40).