Books banned by censorship, literary essays, female characters silenced in Brazilian literature and utopias. These are the themes of the 4 episodes of the series “Breath Reading”, by Oxygen, a journalism and science communication podcast, produced by students from Labjor-Unicamp and coordinated by Simone Pallone.
Lasting around 30 minutes each, the series' episodes are based on interviews with 4 professors from the Institute of Language Studies, IEL-Unicamp: Márcia Azevedo de Abreu, Alexandre Soares Carneiro, Lúcia Granja and Carlos Eduardo Ornelas Berriel. The researchers' speeches are interspersed with narrations, readings of excerpts from books and soundtracks.
Episodes can be accessed via Oxigênio website, fur Radio and TV Unicamp website, fur TV Unicamp YouTube channel or by aggregators like Google Podcasts e Spotify. In the description of the programs on the Oxigênio website, full transcriptions of all episodes of the series are also available, so that people who are deaf or have some hearing impairment can access the content.
The series “Breath Reading” was created and produced by Laís Souza Toledo Pereira. Script editing and supervision are by Simone Pallone. The technical work was carried out by Gustavo Campos and Octávio Augusto Fonseca, from Rádio Unicamp. And Helena Ansani Nogueira helped publicize the episodes.
the episodes
In the first episode “Licentious book = Prohibited reading”, professor and researcher Márcia Azevedo de Abreu spoke about licentious novels: books that mix sex scenes with philosophical discussions about religion, morals or issues of human nature. Márcia explained how censorship operated in Brazil in the 18th and 19th centuries and also how the clandestine circulation of banned books occurred at that time. The researcher also told the curious story of a licentious book that, inexplicably until now, was one of the first novels officially published in Brazil.
In the second episode “The stage rehearsal or the spectacle of doubt”, professor and researcher Alexandre Soares Carneiro spoke about the essay, a type of text that can take different formats and that gives freedom to its writers to reveal the irregular process of their thoughts, their doubts and even their defects, all in a similar tone with a conversation. Alexandre presented the book Essay, by Michel de Montaigne, a 16th century Frenchman who inaugurated the use of the word “essay” to refer to this type of text and who wrote on the most diverse topics: from pedantry, cannibal Indians to thumbs. Alexandre also talked about essay writing in Brazil (which is more important than it seems) and gave tips on essays and essayists.
In the third episode “Heiresses of Capitu? Silenced female characters”, professor and researcher Lúcia Granja spoke about some books of Brazilian literature in which a male narrator tries to omit the voice of a female character from the plot. Women's voices, however, manage to escape and insert themselves into the works in different ways. Lúcia focused her analysis on the novel Dom Casmurro, by Machado de Assis, but also talked about how this narrative model reappears in St. Bernard, by Graciliano Ramos, Great Sertão: Veredas, by Guimarães Rosa, A cup of anger, by Raduan Nassar and Hosanna in the gutter, by Marcelo Mirisola.
In the fourth episode “Utopia – the dream that precedes the nightmare?”, professor and researcher Carlos Eduardo Ornelas Berriel presented utopias as a type of contradictory text. Going beyond the common notion of “utopia” as a perfect place or an unattainable situation, the researcher said that utopias, with a cynical laugh, would be ambiguous, as they lament the loss of a reality that is becoming the past because of a profound social transformation. Berriel also spoke about the problems of perfection and dystopia, a type of narrative that describes a “perfectly imperfect” society. The professor also commented on an episode of the dystopian series Black Mirror and talked about how dystopias can help us understand the period in which we live.
