BEAL, Sophia. Brazil Under Construction – Fiction and Public Works. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.

Abstract

The book Brazil Under Construction – Fiction and Public Works (2013), by Sophia Beal, Associate Professor of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Studies in the University of Minnesota, proposes an important reflection on the relation between the Brazilian culture developed throughout the 20^th century and the state public works to which the official narrative has attributed ideals of modernization, cohesiveness of indentity, and progress. The work is in the field of cultural studies and comprises the analysis of literary texts, songs, plays, charges, and films. The research is multidisciplinary – referring, for instance, to geography, architecture, history, and politics - and innovative for bringing out the debate on infrastructure to the sphere of literary criticism and for presenting different readings of the texts that were approached.