“A book of intensities”. This is how the writer and professor at the Faculty of Arts Luis Alberto Brandão defines Spaces of literary work, a book he launches in Belo Horizonte this Saturday, the 9th. Published by Chão da Feira, the volume advances the investigations that Brandão began in Theories of literary space (Perspectiva, 2013), a work that is already considered one of the landmarks of contemporary Brazilian literary studies. The launch of Spaces of Literary Work – a book that the author sees as a “little brother” of the previous one – will be at 11 am at the Jenipapo bookstore, on Rua Fernandes Tourinho, 241, in Savassi.

In the 2013 book, finalist for the Jabuti Prize in the Theory/Literary Criticism category, Luis Alberto Brandão proposed – with theory itself as the point of convergence for his investigation – a systematization of the main ways in which the “category” of space is used in literary studies. Now, in the new volume, he deepens this reflection by bringing the concept of work – which he characterizes as a “problem notion”, due to its ambivalences – to the center of his attention. Under this modulation (and returning to the postulate of thinkers such as Barthes and Foucault, among others), the Fale professor puts back on the scene the question of what a work is, exactly – and also what a book is.

At one point, the author will specifically address the ambivalent character of the book “as a ‘corporeal artifact’ and, at the same time, a ‘speech to an audience’”. In this, his argument dialogues with reflections that French historian Roger Chartier presented at UFMG in the series of conferences held last September. In them, Chartier talked about books being at the same time a “material good” (the physical product, property of the buyer) and an “immaterial good” (the speech, property of the author). In his essays, which discuss the work of Chartier and other authors, Luis Alberto Brandão will examine precisely this double nature of the book, that is, its ambivalence as object and work – as well as the ambivalence of the “notion-problem” itself. of work.

Spatial organization of the volume

The professor organized his book into 17 chapters, which are divided into two large sections. Despite being thematically consequent, these chapters can also be understood as essays of relative autonomy, as if they were variations on a common theme.

Called Thinking about the spaces of the work, the first section brings together eight chapters, in which Brandão mentions the production of authors such as Marcílio França Castro, Zulmira Ribeiro Tavares, Orides Fontela and William Carlos Williams. In these chapters, the researcher advances in the investigation of concepts such as art, science, matter, body, space, substance, authorship, book and work and discusses the role of the various agents that configure the work that are located beyond the author, such as the critic, the editor, reader, translator and “literary curator”.

In the second section, called In work: reading-writing experiments”, the critical undertaking “expands its margins”, as the book itself explains in its own words, and the author begins to present the result of his intellectual exercises no longer through directly theoretical reflections, but through creation and experimentation exercises. Composed of nine chapters, this section brings together texts of an experimental nature (in different measures), in which the author makes efforts “to question possible ways of conceiving and executing critical activity”. There are gathered chapters developed in fact “on the margins of criticism, or on the margins of its margins, ambivalently proposing to establish, as valid, non-consolidated and unusual ways of doing criticism”, as the author himself notes in the opening chapter of the second section , dedicated to Brazilian modernism.

The chapters that follow advance in the form of biographical and autobiographical notes, work reports, correspondence scrutinization, among other modulations. In them, the author investigates and comments, more or less in detail, on the works and lives of authors such as Augusto de Campos, João Gilberto Noll and Sérgio Sant’Anna. They are reflections of different natures, but constant in the motto (the space, the work) and in the freedom they give themselves to flow free from the constraints imposed by orthodox theoretical practice, as if it sought to achieve precisely that which, in terms of knowledge, is located beyond them. . Interestingly, due to this distinction between the two sections and the way in which each one evolves internally, the book seems to be structured as a journey from direct to indirect, from objective to subjective, from theoretical to performative, from discursive to aphoristic, from prosaic to the poetic.

From a graphic point of view, the book appears framed by a creation that articulates colors, shapes and spaces in the style of a Piet Mondrian (the modern master of the uses of the geometry of space in abstract visual arts) involved with Tetris, the infamous computer game. The image set of front and back covers is made up of colored blocks that use practically the same primary red, blue and yellow and the same black that Mondrian used in the paintings of his most renowned phase. Created by designer and editor Luísa Rabello, this graphic project seems particularly appropriate for a book that, to debate the space in literary work, fits and articulates criticism, theory and literary creation itself.

Advanced transdisciplinary research

The first step towards consolidating the reflections that Luis Alberto Brandão presents in Spaces of Literary Work was his research residency at the Institute of Advanced Transdisciplinary Studies (Ieat) at UFMG from March 2013 to February 2014. During the period, he undertook an investigation of space as a transdisciplinary category, holding a diversity of functions and situated between, through and beyond disciplines such as philosophy, physics, architecture, geography, semiotics, linguistics – and art theory and literature.

In addition to the aforementioned Theories of Literary Space (2013), Luis Alberto Brandão published, as an essayist, Canção de amor para João Gilberto Noll (Relicário, 2019), Graphies of identity: contemporary literature and national imaginary (Lamparina, 2005), also a finalist for the Jabuti, and A glass eye: the narrative of Sérgio Sant’Anna (Fale/UFMG, 2000), winner of the National Literature Prize in the City of Belo Horizonte.

As a writer of poetry and fiction, he published Princípios de cartografia and other poems (Impressões de Minas, 2023), Rain of letters (Scipione, 2008), winner of the João-de-Barro National Literature Prize and finalist for Jabuti, Tablados: Livro of books (7Letras, 2004), Manhã do Brasil (Scipione, 2000), finalist for the São Paulo Literature Prize and the Portugal Telecom Literature Prize, and Knowing Stone: the Book of Statues (Autêntica, 1999), winner of the Bolsa Vitae of Arts.

Book: Spaces of literary work
Author: Luis Alberto Brandão
Editora Chão da Feira
R$ 65 / 308 pages

​(Ewerton Martins Ribeiro – Cedecom/UFMG)