![]() ![]() Brazil’s upper crust mentality, haunted by the dusk of slavery, obsessed with cosmopolitanism while still primordially colonial and racist, are in the epicenter of Assis’ prose. Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis is a writer of labyrinths where writers such as Susan Sontag, Phillip Roth, and José Saramago have delved into. Dedicated to “the worm that first gnawed at the cold flesh” of his cadaver, the book is divided into short chapters, some of them quite experimental – one consisting only of a sequence of dots, another skipped for pure spectral playfulness. Its narrator, Brás Cubas, an heir and dilettante from Rio de Janeiro, crafts his recollections directly from the otherworld, from where he can write while being excused from any social inhibitions, and conventions. Speakers: Flora Thompson-Deveaux, PhD, translator and research director at Radio Novelo and Sidney Chalhoub, Professor of History and African and African-American Studies at Harvard Universityīuilt upon an elliptic, witty realism, Machado de Assis’ The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas is considered the quintessential portrait of Brazilian late XIX century. ![]() This event will be held in English, but simultaneous translation will be offered to Portuguese. ![]() A shared reading of The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas with Flora Thomson-DeVeaux and Sidney Chalhoub ![]()
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