Description:

The Environmental Humanities Research Workshop presents:

The Brazilian Backlands Reconstructed: Environmental Mimesis in João Guimarães Rosa’s The Devil to Pay in the Backlands

Victoria Saramago, Romance Languages and Literatures, University of Chicago

Few Brazilian novels have been as influential as João Guimarães Rosa’s Grande sertão: veredas (1956; trans. The Devil to Pay in the Backlands, 1963). In many senses, Grande sertão: veredas epitomizes a long tradition of intellectual and literary reflection on the country’s backlands, reconfigured in this novel via Modernism and existentialism, but remaining deeply grounded in the specificities of local environments and ways of life. This talk investigates some fundamental ways in which this novel has functioned as a social and environmental agent by inspiring a number of conservationist projects in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais and setting symbolic standards for what referential reality should be. Drawing on theories of fiction and artistic agency, this talk seeks to explore key aspects of the convergence between fiction and environmental conservation. It does so by analyzing projects that explicitly attempt to recreate and evoke the novel’s settings in the Brazilian backlands: the Grande Sertão Veredas National Park, the Guimarães Rosa Touristic Circuit, and the Manuelzão Project.

Victoria Saramago is an assistant professor of Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Studies at the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Chicago. Her work covers twentieth- and twenty-first-century Latin American literatures with a focus on environmental studies and studies of fiction and fictionality. Her book, Fictional Environments: Mimesis, Deforestation, and Development in Latin America, is forthcoming in 2020 by Northwestern University Press. 

______________________________________________

The Environmental Humanities Research Workshop of the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities fosters a community of scholars at Northwestern and in the Chicago area who are interested in what we have broadly termed the environmental humanities. Workshop participants share an interest in questions of nature, science, ethics, aesthetics, environmental policy, and the shifting relationships between the human and the non-human, as well as in refining our understanding of what “the environmental humanities” comprises. The Environmental Humanities Research Workshop hosts informal discussions about provocative pieces of scholarship as well as works-in-progress, and organizes public talks by established scholars whose work has helped define and expand humanistic approaches to environmental issues.

To join the Environmental Humanities listserv, please email:
Corey Byrnes (corey.byrnes@northwestern.edu) or Keith Woodhouse (keith.woodhouse@northwestern.edu).