Portuguese Language in the Brazilian Context
Faculty
José Luiz Passos is Associate Professor of Luso-Brazilian literatures and cultures at UCLA, where he is Vice Chair for Graduate Studies in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, and Director of the Center for Brazilian Studies at the UCLA International Institute. He is the author of Ruínas de linhas puras [Ruins of Pure Lines, 1998] on displacement and identity in Mário de Andrade’s novel Macunaíma (1928); and Machado de Assis, o romance com pessoas [Machado de Assis: Novels with Persons, 2007] on Shakespearean influences and moral imagination in the Brazilian realist novel. In 2008 his play “Carmelo’s War,” on border conflict and family ties after Othello and Rebellion in the Backlands [Euclides da Cunha’s Os sertões], received a staged reading at the 32nd Comparative Drama Conference in Los Angeles. In February 2009 Alfaguara issued his first novel, Nosso grão mais fino [Our Finer Grain]. He is currently writing a book on visiting and travel narratives about Brazil as a dystopian social landscape.