Ethnic Caricature and the Comic Sensibility

When realists engage in comedy, they are hardly ever funny. Their comic efforts strike the reader as clumsy intrusions into a world that is otherwise governed by natural or societal forces. Yet the comic mode, and an aspect of the comic that could be called the comic sensibility, can be contextualized within and against realism. Liminal and transgressive, the comic sensibility solved some of the representative conundrums of realism, disrupting its smooth surfaces and thumbing its nose at determinism. The comic sensibility depended heavily on caricature—specifically, ethnic caricature—and while ethnic caricature usually denigrated its subjects, in notable cases, as in the work of Charles Chesnutt, Stephen Crane, Bruno Lessing (Rudolph Block), vaudeville comedians, and comic-strip artists, the comic sensibility provided openings for ethnic and racial minorities to make meaning, form a collective identity, and foster solidarity.

Realism and the Profession of Authorship

This chapter examines tensions between authorship and publishing in the era of American literary realism. The publishing industry changed with the emergence of literary agents, the growing financial significance of magazines and syndication, and the increasingly influential role of publishing-house editors. All were signs of a centralizing and marketizing publishing system flexible enough to withstand changes in dominant literary genres, tastes, and fashions. With examples from the careers of well- and lesser-known realists—William Dean Howells, Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, Constance Fenimore Woolson, Charles Chesnutt—authorship remained stubbornly immune to professionalization, in part because writing is better considered as a craft than as a profession and in part because the practices creating authorship’s marketization did not require its professionalization.

A tradução de um poema de Stephen Crane

O artigo analisa a tradução de um poema de Stephen Crane, feita por mim, e comenta a utilização, no texto traduzido, de recursos retóricos, lexicais e formais encontrados num poema de Castro Alves.