Earl E. Fitz
Brazilian Narrative and Poetry. Comparative Studies between Brazil and Spanish-America.inter-American literature (that is, the literatures of North, Central, and South America).
In terms of Brazilian literature, I am primarily interested in the colonial period and in the twentieth century, though, of course, I give courses in other periods of Brazilian literature as well. I am especially interested in poetry and narrative, in particular the work of Oswald de Andrade, Joao Cabral de Melo Neto, Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Machado de Assis, and Clarice Lispector (about whose work I've recently completed a new book that reads Clarice as the poststructural writer par excellence and that examines the unique role sexuality plays in her stories, novels, and "cronicas"). I have also written extensively on Machado as the true originator of Latin America's first "new narrative" and the importance this has for a more complete sense of how narrative has evolved in both Brazil and Spanish America.
As a Latin Americanist, I am, again, primarily interested in the historical evolution of poetry and narrative in Brazil and Spanish America. My real passion here, however, lies in reading Latin American literature in a comparative perspective, one that seeks to highlight the numerous similarities that bind these two great cultures together but, more importantly, that also seeks to identify and explain the many important differences that distinguish them and make them unique. My goal, in the next two or three years, is to write a unified and comparative history of Latin American literature, one that, without homogenizing them, systematically integrates the Spanish American and Brazilian literary traditions.
My third area of teaching and research interest is comparative literature, specifically as this discipline related to what I like to think of as inter-American literature, or, as some people prefer to call it, the literature of the Americas. I am, for example, currently in the process of writing a book that compares the development of narrative (principally the novel) in the United States and Brazil. Since 1979, I have also given a great many courses that deal with this fascinating if sometimes contentious subject from other perspectives as well, including theme (miscegenation; the wilderness), genre (the New World novel; the epic poem), and period (the colonial experience in the Americas; the nineteenth century; the concept of modernism in English and French speaking Canada, the United States, Spanish America and Brazil).