Nature and Environment in Brazilian Culture and Literature

Catalog description

This course aims to understand how Brazilian culture and literature approach its surrounding environment, using different sources of materials: travel writing descriptions, accounts of visitors and explorers, scientists, visual arts, literary texts, anthropological and ethnographic approaches, history, philosophy and media. The course offers a complete survey of the complex relations involving the Portuguese Colonial system of exploration and exploitation of the environment (plantation, monoculture, slavery), land and border occupation of indigenous lands, demarcation, and the 20th occupation of the Amazon. It provides the essential historical and cultural backgrounds of Brazilian engagement with its environment. Taught in English.