A África carioca em lentes européias: corpos, sinais e expressões

A proposta deste artigo é examinar as maneiras pelas quais alguns viajantes europeus que estiveram no Rio de Janeiro durante a primeira metade do século XIX diferenciaram os africanos na experiência da escravidão, tratando de um viés temático específico: os registros produzidos pela literatura de viagem oitocentista a respeito de suas belezas físicas, sinais corporais e expressões de cantos e danças. A convergência temática e valorativa desses relatos permite-nos observar a reiteração de certas tópicas que cristalizaram os significados mais comuns atribuídos pelos olhares estrangeiros aos africanismos com que depararam na cidade que continha, à época, a maior população escrava das Américas.<br>The proposal of this article is to investigate the ways some European travellers, who have came to the city of Rio de Janeiro during the first half of the 19th century, registered Africans in the slavery experience. Foreigners who visited Brazilian Court until 1850 faced the biggest African slave population of the Americas, and the set of their literature, which describes such cultural and social counterpose, reveals conceptual reiterations of a whole lot of physical and behavioural characteristics given to Africans in captivity

Chronology and Statistics : Objective Understanding of Authorial Meaning

This paper is an attempt to prove that chronology and statistics are the effective means for objective interpretation of authorial meaning. In defence of his hermeneutic theory against Eagleton’s liberal-humanistic opposition, Hirsch asserts no other object can be the norm of literary criticism than authorial meaning. One of the most useful tools for the objective detection of authorial meaning is the Sanger-Kroeber method—Sanger’s chronological study of the structure of fiction and Kroeber’s statistical quantification of formal elements. Its application to the analysis of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton reveals that the novel’s central protagonist is the eponymous heroine, not her father as has been conventionally considered. Subjective readings will be superseded by new ones. But, readings based on objective data will not