Control of the Imaginary was first published in 1989. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. In Control of the Imaginary Luiz Costa Lima explains how the distinction between truth and fiction emerged at the beginning of modern times and why, upon its emergence, fiction fell under suspicion. Costa Lima not only describes the continuous relationship between Western notions of reason and subjectivity over a broad time-frame—the Renaissance to the first decade of the twentieth century—but he uses this occasion to reexamine the literary traditions of France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, England, and Germany. The book reconstructs the dominant frames in the European tradition between the Middle Ages and the nineteenth century from the perspective of a Latin American who sees the culture of his native Brazil haunted by unresolved questions from the Northern Hemisphere. Costa Lima manages to synthesize positions from philosophy, anthropology, sociology, psychology, linguistics, and history without separating the theoretical discussion from his historical reconstructions. The first chapter situates the problem and grounds the emergent distinction between truth and fiction in a very close analysis of one of the first European historians, Fernao Lopes, who sets the tone for the condemnation of fiction in the name of the truth of history and the potential for individual interpretation. Costa Lima pursues these notions through the aesthetic debates of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to the writings of the French historian Michelet. He also devotes an illuminating chapter to the invention of the strictures imposed on fiction.
This book clarifies the musical dramaturgy of comedy writer and musician Luiz Carlos Martins Penna (1815-48) – a notion that encompasses both the theatrical text and its performance. The corpus for this analysis is composed of twelve comedies by Martins Penna written between 1833 and 1846, divided into three groups, which I have called Lundu, Aria, and Alleluia. The sound universe made up by the three groups of comedies covers African-Brazilian genres and musical-choreographic styles (batuque, fado, lundu, miudinho, muquirão), the transnational urban popular universe (lundu, tirana, quadrilha, marcha, waltz, caxuxa, tonadilla, polka), and modinhas and Italian opera, in addition to romantic concertos, Gregorian chant and Iberian religious theater (loas). To evaluate the multiple meanings acquired by the musical allusions inserted into the comedy texts and theatrical performances, this research reveals the network which included the author, actors, theater owners, publishers and the public, and other agents, such as black Catholic irmandades (brotherhoods), Freemasonry, and institutions linked to the imperial government. The sound universe of the comedies of Martins Penna are compared to the comedic axes of the Western theatrical tradition (a study of situations and characters) and the axes of performance (solo and chorus), contemplating the relationship between the repertoires written by Martins Penna and the repertoires of Brazilians and Portuguese artists, a mix of actors, singers and dancers, who performed in his comedies. The research questions the notion of authorship and reveals the importance of the partnership between theatrical writers, artists and publishers, through which the comedies of Martins Penna have reached the second half of the nineteenth century through the present.
The Brazilian multi-instrumentalist, composer, and bandleader Hermeto Pascoal produces music that is unmistakably individual, drawing on a kaleidoscopic variety of influences, including contemporary jazz and the popular musical styles of the Northeast of Brazil, such cocos, emboladas and repentes, as well as baião, frevo and choro, with results verging on contemporary art music. His complex compositions are highly demanding of the performer, with use of dissonant harmonies, polyrhythms, unconventional timbres, atonal improvisations, aleatory techniques and more. He became known to American musicians and music-lovers through a brief period working with the late Miles Davis, and through a remarkable series of recordings for Warner and the Brazilian label Som Da Gente. Luiz Costa-Lima Neto's book is the first publication in English focusing on the work of this musical genius, looking at music produced between 1981 and 1993. During this period Hermeto worked with a group of five musicians in an ensemble that was called "Hermeto Pascoal e Grupo". Working with Hermeto were Itibere Luis Zwarg (electric bass, tuba and bombardon), Jovino Santos Neto (piano, keyboard, flutes), Antonio Luis Santana ("Pernambuco") - (percussion), Carlos Daltro Malta (saxophones, flutes, piccolo) and Marcio Villa Bahia (drum kit and percussion). Luiz Costa-Lima Neto explores the sources of Hermeto's experimental music, their development and characteristics, and describes how these were transformed into a musical system. He reconstructs the processes of creation and music-making by the group, with analysis of a selection of the ensemble's pieces, and demonstrates the innovative role played by Hermeto Pascoal in the history of popular music in Brazil, fusing regional, national, and international elements to create a universal music which continues to affirm it roots.
Control of the Imaginary was first published in 1989. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. In Control of the Imaginary Luiz Costa Lima explains how the distinction between truth and fiction emerged at the beginning of modern times and why, upon its emergence, fiction fell under suspicion. Costa Lima not only describes the continuous relationship between Western notions of reason and subjectivity over a broad time-frame—the Renaissance to the first decade of the twentieth century—but he uses this occasion to reexamine the literary traditions of France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, England, and Germany. The book reconstructs the dominant frames in the European tradition between the Middle Ages and the nineteenth century from the perspective of a Latin American who sees the culture of his native Brazil haunted by unresolved questions from the Northern Hemisphere. Costa Lima manages to synthesize positions from philosophy, anthropology, sociology, psychology, linguistics, and history without separating the theoretical discussion from his historical reconstructions. The first chapter situates the problem and grounds the emergent distinction between truth and fiction in a very close analysis of one of the first European historians, Fernao Lopes, who sets the tone for the condemnation of fiction in the name of the truth of history and the potential for individual interpretation. Costa Lima pursues these notions through the aesthetic debates of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to the writings of the French historian Michelet. He also devotes an illuminating chapter to the invention of the strictures imposed on fiction.
The title of this work derives from Costa-Lima's reading of what is probably the most famous passage in Kant's Third Critique. In Kant's thesis that the results of aesthetic judgment are "generally communicable but without the mediation of a concept," Costa-Lima discovers the necessity to identify and underscore a silence. This silence - these "limits of voice" - becomes the complex metonymy for the central theme of this book, literary experience as a case of aesthetic experience. In pursuing this theme, Costa-Lima views aesthetic and literary experience as a historically limited potentiality and examines the limits of aesthetic experience, which comes from its dependence on contextual requirements. The concern about "limits of voice" is developed on three different levels. First, Costa-Lima focuses, as a historical and systematic condition for aesthetic and literary experience, on subjectivity as the subject's right to speak in his/her own name. Second, he argues that, although historical modes of speaking and experiencing were inscribed into and legitimized by cosmological constructions, subjectivity requires the existence of a context no longer grounded in cosmology, which he refers to as "the Law." Third, he postulates the double dependence of literary and aesthetic experience on the emergence of subjectivity and the existence of "the Law" as its enabling and limiting frame condition. This book answers a challenge that has persisted in literary theory and literary history for almost two decades - how to historicize the concept of literature.
This compelling, many-faceted work argues that Western culture has always found something profoundly unsettling about imaginative writing and that it has devised various ways of "containing" such writing or at least making it less dangerous. The historical record of censorship and other forms of the containment of literature is relatively well known, though it has been analyzed more often in terms of its effects on literature than its causes. Costa Lima demonstrates that theories of society and of human nature are at stake in these acts of rejection and condemnation. A new historical consciousness has recently swept across the entire breadth of literary studies. However, Costa Lima shows that this return to history is frequently nothing more than the return of an unexamined old history of literature, merely updated in its vocabulary and reflecting current concerns with such issues as gender or cultural difference. By contrast, he challenges the assumptions of the old history (and therefore of the new, insofar as the latter reinstates the old) and calls for the elaboration of an entirely different perspective on the historical course of literature. Costa Lima asserts that since the beginning of modernity, Western reason has been shaped in opposition to--and through the repression of--the imaginative faculty, typified by fictionality. He focuses on the history of such concepts as mimesis, individuality, and verisimilitude, and in the process covers a wide range of authors and topics--Cervantes, Diderot, Borges, autobiographical writing, and Latin American literature, among others. The Dark Side of Reason consists of essays drawn from two books, Sociedade e discurso fictional (1986) and O Fingidor e o censor (1988). It also includes a chapter, written especially for this volume, that discusses Shakespeare's Tempest in the light of Costa Lima's argument about control of the imaginary.
The title of this work derives from Costa-Lima's reading of what is probably the most famous passage in Kant's Third Critique. In Kant's thesis that the results of aesthetic judgment are "generally communicable but without the mediation of a concept," Costa-Lima discovers the necessity to identify and underscore a silence. This silence - these "limits of voice" - becomes the complex metonymy for the central theme of this book, literary experience as a case of aesthetic experience. In pursuing this theme, Costa-Lima views aesthetic and literary experience as a historically limited potentiality and examines the limits of aesthetic experience, which comes from its dependence on contextual requirements. The concern about "limits of voice" is developed on three different levels. First, Costa-Lima focuses, as a historical and systematic condition for aesthetic and literary experience, on subjectivity as the subject's right to speak in his/her own name. Second, he argues that, although historical modes of speaking and experiencing were inscribed into and legitimized by cosmological constructions, subjectivity requires the existence of a context no longer grounded in cosmology, which he refers to as "the Law." Third, he postulates the double dependence of literary and aesthetic experience on the emergence of subjectivity and the existence of "the Law" as its enabling and limiting frame condition. This book answers a challenge that has persisted in literary theory and literary history for almost two decades - how to historicize the concept of literature.
This book clarifies the musical dramaturgy of comedy writer and musician Luiz Carlos Martins Penna (1815-48) – a notion that encompasses both the theatrical text and its performance. The corpus for this analysis is composed of twelve comedies by Martins Penna written between 1833 and 1846, divided into three groups, which I have called Lundu, Aria, and Alleluia. The sound universe made up by the three groups of comedies covers African-Brazilian genres and musical-choreographic styles (batuque, fado, lundu, miudinho, muquirão), the transnational urban popular universe (lundu, tirana, quadrilha, marcha, waltz, caxuxa, tonadilla, polka), and modinhas and Italian opera, in addition to romantic concertos, Gregorian chant and Iberian religious theater (loas). To evaluate the multiple meanings acquired by the musical allusions inserted into the comedy texts and theatrical performances, this research reveals the network which included the author, actors, theater owners, publishers and the public, and other agents, such as black Catholic irmandades (brotherhoods), Freemasonry, and institutions linked to the imperial government. The sound universe of the comedies of Martins Penna are compared to the comedic axes of the Western theatrical tradition (a study of situations and characters) and the axes of performance (solo and chorus), contemplating the relationship between the repertoires written by Martins Penna and the repertoires of Brazilians and Portuguese artists, a mix of actors, singers and dancers, who performed in his comedies. The research questions the notion of authorship and reveals the importance of the partnership between theatrical writers, artists and publishers, through which the comedies of Martins Penna have reached the second half of the nineteenth century through the present.
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