Fellow and Tutor in Portuguese Prof Claire Williams has been featured on the BBC Radio 4 flagship programme, In Our Time.
In a new episode of the popular, long-running programme hosted by Misha Glenny, Prof Williams, along with Dr Viviane Carvalho da Annunciação (Cambridge) and Dr Ana Cláudia Suriani da Silva (UCL), provides expert comment on the nineteenth-century Brazilian writer Machado de Assis (1839-1908). This is the first time a Brazilian topic has been the focus of the programme.
The grandson of freed slaves, from a humble background, Machado became a journalist and civil servant, a member of the Brazilian intelligentsia and co-founder (and first President) of the Brazilian Academy of Letters. A prolific author (and poet, dramatist and journalist), he is best known for his powerful, entertaining, sometimes experimental short stories, and three novels: The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas (1881), Quincas Borba (1891) and Dom Casmurro (1899). In these works, he enacted a critique of the ruling classes using the strategy of creating first-person narrators who soon reveal themselves to be unreliable, forcing the reader to work hard to discover what is really going on. There are parallels with Laurence Sterne (who was a major influence), but also Nikolai Gogol, Charles Dickens and Honoré de Balzac, in the blending of humour and social satire, although occasionally touching on the harsh reality of life in a nation whose economy depended on enslaved labour. Machado de Assis is studied by second-year students at Oxford as part of the Modern Period Paper and has been the subject of two recent DPhil theses in the Faculty of Modern Languages.
The episode is due to be aired on Thursday 11 June, after which it will remain available as a podcast.
About Prof Williams
Professor Claire Williams joined Oxford in 2009 as Fellow and Tutor in Portuguese at St Peter’s and Professor of Brazilian Literature and Culture in the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages. She teaches Modern Literature from the Portuguese-speaking world (from Machado de Assis and Aluísio de Azevedo to Conceição Evaristo and Luiz Ruffato), Brazilian Cinema and Contemporary Brazilian Literature. Her research focuses on women’s writing and minority writing from the Lusophone world, particularly Clarice Lispector and Conceição Evaristo (Brazil), Maria Ondina Braga and Ana Luísa Amaral (Portugal), and Lília Momplé (Mozambique). She is interested in women’s life writing (especially biography), travel writing and translation. You can learn more about her research and publications here.