Two Great Portuguese-Language Novelists: José Saramago and Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis

Literature in Portuguese from both Brazil and Portugal has been gaining increasing exposure in the English-speaking world. This seminar looks at two of the most renowned novelists in the Portuguese language.

Machado de Assis (pictured) uses dry, satiric wit and ruthless self-examination to represent Brazil in the era of emancipation and transformation from empire to republic, in his own inimitable mode of ‘personal realism’ while writing as a person of African-diaspora descent.

Saramago, writing in the wake of the Carnation Revolution in Portugal in 1974, uses modes of historical and speculative fiction to weigh the stakes and responsibilities of imagination in an age of opportunity and peril. 

• September 22: Machado de Assis, The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas (Costa and Patterson translation)
• October 13: Machado de Assis, Dom Casmurro (Caldwell translation)
• November 3: Saramago, Baltasar and Blimunda
• November 17: Saramago, Blindness