Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Date of Degree
6-2026
Document Type
Master's Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Arts
Program
Comparative Literature
Advisor
Paul Julian Smith
Subject Categories
Comparative Literature | Film and Media Studies | Latin American Literature | Portuguese Literature | Spanish and Portuguese Language and Literature
Keywords
World Literature, Urban Studies, Clarice Lispector, Recife, Glauber Rocha, Brazilian Film
Abstract
This paper examines the Brazilian city as a knotted site of textual representation and interpretation, where proximity and distance entangle, and questions of modernity produce disorienting, often contradictory readings. In one account of representing urban space, distance becomes an aesthetic framework, used variously to critique modernity, evade censorship, or escape location altogether. Another account takes proximity and particularity as its governing principles for representing the city and its spaces — a model that has become increasingly popular in contemporary global film. The study begins with “far-off” South American cities in literature and films, contrasting two European and two Brazilian viewpoints of 20th-century modernity and its “placement.” Virginia Woolf’s first novel The Voyage Out and Marcel Camus’s 1959 film Black Orpheus project the South American city across the Atlantic, using their settings to construct photo negatives of European modernity. On the contrary, Clarice Lispector’s The Besieged City presents a fictional city that evades placement on either side of the Atlantic, while Glauber Rocha’s Terra em Transe (Entranced Earth, 1967) transforms its post-coup Rio de Janeiro filming locations into a washed-out setting called “Eldorado.” Both texts avoid definitively placing their cities in Brazil; yet, where Lispector eschews being located, Rocha invites national allegory through its absence. To approach these texts, this study engages with theories of World Literature and argues against theoretical approaches to reading location that collapse fictional setting into another point on the map. Across a second part, this paper argues that Kleber Mendonça Filho’s trilogy of feature films set in Recife “zoom in” on urban space, encouraging varied and global audiences to close-read a less-represented city and complicating its transnational image. The paper offers close readings of the locations and local histories referenced in O Som ao Redor (Neighboring Sounds, 2013), Aquarius (2016), and O Agente Secreto (The Secret Agent, 2025). This analysis draws on the spatial theories of Henri Lefebvre, Michel de Certeau, and Manuel Castells, engaging with Mendonça Filho’s multi-dimensional portrayals and critiques of Recife's architecture and local history. Through on-location shooting, an expanded definition of urban “mapping,” and a collage of genre elements, Recife appears in hyper-focus, becoming legible through film itself rather than a realist portrayal of its spaces.
Recommended Citation
Bunton, Tyler, "The Legible City: "Placing" Brazilian Modernity from Far and Near" (2026). CUNY Academic Works.
https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/6734
Included in
Comparative Literature Commons, Film and Media Studies Commons, Latin American Literature Commons, Portuguese Literature Commons
