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Reflective Essay: The Role Of Identity In Brazilian Literature

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I have been teaching Brazilian Literature since I finished my Master’s. I started at a private high school planning strategies to overcome the students’ reluctance to read canonical novels. Some of the students were fascinated to quickly consume best-sellers from any other nationality, rather than to contemplate a book by a Brazilian or a Portuguese author written dozens of years ago. I realized in practice what I have discussed with my colleagues at disciplines on teaching theory: the role of the Literature teacher was beyond showing aesthetics or cultural values or relationships between literature and power in the society.
As a teacher of Literature in Portuguese, I should teach language as well, from Camões to Guimarães Rosa, since the students (as well as the teacher) must “trespass” language borders, and so I should strategically arrange the readings in the syllabus. Besides, I should make a relationship between the students’ reality and the reading of texts of different cultures and times. One of the most remarkable reading projects on doing so was the one in which I suggested the study of a web of …show more content…

Due to my recent research, as I demonstrated in the Research Statement, I am very interested in discussing the different representations of Brazilian identity and society on the narratives from the 19th to the 21th century. Based on this theme, I could choose a set of literary narratives including authors such as Machado de Assis, Aluisio Azevedo´s, Mário de Andrade, João Antonio, João Guimarães Rosa, Jorge Amado, Ferréz, Luiz Ruffato, Chico Buarque. In addition to the reading of fiction, discussing Brazilian films as the recent “Que horas ela volta” (“The Second Mother”, in English), by Anna Muylaert, or “Edificio Master”, by Eduardo Coutinho, could improve the in-depth knowledge of Brazilian

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