Roberto Schwarz Byond Borders
International Symposyum
6th and 7th June 2024
Universität zu Köln, Cologne, Germany

Roberto Schwarz’s works on Brazilian literature and culture transcends national borders. Practising in an originally successful way a basic and challenging precept of dialectical criticism, described by himself as the relationship between literary form and social process, Schwarz unveiled the “top-class effrontery” of Machado de Assis’ narrator, the contradictions of Oswald de Andrade’s avant-garde art, the limits of Caetano Veloso’s Tropicalism, to name a few important examples. Under his radical and revolutionary gaze, these figures leave the Brazilian canon to enter world literary history, expressing in their own literary form fractures that point respectively to the functionality of slavery for industrial capitalism, to the illusion of modernisation in the former colonies and to the transformation of social, cultural, and economic mismatch into a symbolic advantage. The displacement of ideologies and the critique of capitalism are, however, not results that Roberto Schwarz achieves through the instrumentalisation of literary work. On the contrary, it is literature itself that allows him to discover aspects that escape the so-called hard sciences and their illusory universal methods. For Schwarz, literature does not reflect reality, the relationship between the two is of a different nature: there would be a correlation of structures, an interdependence, which would make life literature and literature life.

Although Roberto Schwarz is notorious in the English-speaking world, his name is hardly known in Germany. The organizers common research interest in his oeuvre has led us to promote the first symposium on Roberto Schwarz in Europe. This will also be a good opportunity to publicise the German translation as Open Access by De Gruyter of Schwarzʼ now classic monograph on the Brazilian writer Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, Ein Meister an der Peripherie des Kapitalismus (here https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783110790016/html), which was originally written in Portuguese and published in 1990.

Our two-day interdisciplinary symposium aims to contribute to the dissemination of Roberto Schwarzʼ thinking, as well as to networking and exchange between researchers in different academic and linguistic contexts. For this reason, the language of the symposium will be mainly English.

Program

June 6th 2024
Opening Remarks
10h – 10h1

Theoretical Matrix
10h15 – 12h15
SILVIA L. LÓPEZ (Carleton College)
The social in the singular: the immanent criticism of Roberto Schwarz
JORGE GRESPAN (Universidade de São Paulo)
Social class and social form in Roberto Schwarz’s criticism
JACQUES LEENHARDT (École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales)
“Wellplaced” and “misplaced” Ideas
FELIPE CATALANI (Universidade de São Paulo)
Uneven and combined catastrophe: Roberto Schwarz and the critical social theory in peripherical capitalism

Lunch
12h15 – 14h

Reflecting Literature
14h – 15h30
NEIL LARSEN (University of California Davis)
Other Machados?, or, the Affinity of the Literary Theory of Roberto Schwarz for the North American Nineteenth Century
RODRIGO ENNES (Universidade de Lisboa)
Misplaced ideas in Eça de Queirós
LEOPOLDO WAIZBORT (Universidade de São Paulo)
Updating Culture and Politics: Roberto Schwarz reads Caetano Veloso’s Verdade tropical

Coffee Break
15h30 – 16h

(Re-)Readings of Machado de Assis
16h-17h30
NATASHA BELFORT PALMEIRA (Université Paris III)
Changing Parameters
JOBST WELGE (Universität Leipzig)
Periphery and the Dialectics of Literary Form:
Roberto Schwarz, Recent Criticism, and the Novels of Machado de Assis
JOSÉ ANTONIO PASTA JR. (Universidade de São Paulo)
The Impossible Point of View / The Point of View of Death: Roberto Schwarz, reader of The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas

Dinner
18h30

June 7th 2024
Criticism on Stage: Theater
9h – 10h30
BEATRIZ PROTAZIO (Universidade Estadual de Maringá)
Fictional writing in Roberto Schwarz’s trajectory: an analysis of two plays written during periods of rising authoritarianism
JOACHIM KÜPPER (Freie Universität Berlin)
Roberto Schwarz and Peter Szondi: Theory of the Modern Drama and A Master on the Periphery of Capitalism
PEDRO MORA (Freie Universität Berlin)
Brecht after the End of History: on the Contemporary Relevance of Epic Theater in the Work of Roberto Schwarz

Coffee Break
10h30 – 11h

Debating Literary Criticism Today
11h – 12h30
STEFAN HELGESSON (Stockholms universitet)
World-Literary Accumulation Otherwise, or, Reading Roberto Schwarz in Africa
NICHOLAS BROWN (University of Illinois Chicago)
Dialectic of Realism
G.S. SAHOTA (University of California Santa Cruz)
Critical Demands of the Non-Normative: Roberto Schwarz and Southern Dialectics

Lunch
12h30 – 14h

14h – 15h30
Ruptures & Transitions
ROBERTO DELLA SANTA (Universidade Aberta de Lisboa)
Leon Trotsky and Roberto Schwarz uneven and combined
MAUD MEYZAUD (Leuphana Universität Lüneburg)
Life as an Essay. On Roberto Schwarz’s “Anatol Rosenfeld, a Foreign Intellectual”
MELANIE STRASSER (Universität Wien)
Exile, Homeland and Translation

Closing Remarks
15h30 – 15h45

No registration is required.

Organisation:
Laura Gagliardi lgagliar@uni-koeln.de
Melanie Strasser melanie.strasser@univie.ac.at
Claudio Cardinali claudiocardinali2@gmail.com