IN-PERSON IAS Talking Points Seminar: Author Defunct, Clerk Defunct

This presentation enquires into the hypothesis that one of the boldest and radical innovations of The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas, the author defunct, had originated from Machado de Assis’ reading of the English essayist Charles Lamb. In the autobiographical and fictional series Essays of Elia, Lamb invented a character and narrator who presents himself as a clerk defunct. The nominalization of defunct (as in defunct author) and the profiling of Elia as a dying and decaying figure, as well as a deceptive narrator, who is constantly playing tricks on the readers, may have inspired Machado in the crafting of Bras Cubas. Moreover, Lamb played out his own death in two other moments of his work. Therefore, in this presentation, I intend to unravel the threads that link Elia to Bras Cubas with an aim of understanding why Machado excluded Lamb from the “definite” prologue to The Posthumous Memoirs.

Speaker

Dr Daniel Lago Monteiro

(Institute of Languages Studies, University of Campinas, Brazil & IAS Visiting Research Fellow)

Respondents

Dr Ana Claudia Suriani da Silva

(Associate Professor in Brazilian Studies, SELCS, UCL)

Professor Gregory Dart

(English department, UCL)

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Image Credit: Machado de Assis - Fundação Biblioteca Nacional / Charles Lamb by William Hazlitt – National Portrait Gallery