Event Date
"A Lírica de Cecília Meireles em sua Certa Ausência do Mundo”
(A Certain Absence from this World: The Poetry of Cecília Meireles)
Presented by Dr. Anelia M. Pietrani, Professor of Brazilian Literature at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), visiting Professor at Indiana University, Bloomington.
Please note that this lecture will be in Portuguese
Lunch will be served
PLEASE RSVP at http://pietrani.eventbrite.com
Sponsored by the Department of Spanish & Portuguese as part of its Luso-Afro-Brazilian Studies Initiative
Cecília Meires (Rio de Janeiro, 1901-1964), a poet writing within the Brazilian modernist movement of the 1920s, although not sharing the same aesthetic values and programmatic norms of Modernismo, she was also by profession a schoolteacher, journalist, and a librarian. A friend of and correspondent with Nobel Prize winner Gabriela Mistral (Chile, 1889-1957), the two poets worked diligently toward a common educational goal: to create libraries for children both in Mexico and Brazil in the 1920-1930s. Meireles travelled extensively in Europe and Asia. A Prolific poet, she published 21 books of poetry, 8 of fiction, 4 textbooks, and a number of essays. "Meireles's tightly woven poems, with their haunting combination of the pictorial and the conceptual, can be read as skeptical reflections on the elusive nature of reality and as sensual experiences in themselves." Self-definition is a central theme in her poetry, there is a persistent "attempt to detain, to fix, to frame...and that effort is constantly thwarted, for the 'I' is no less tenuous and elusive than the rest of reality." (Women's Writing in Latin America, Sara Castro Klarén, Sylvia Molloy, Beatriz Sarlo).