Editorial

THIS number of ADVANCED STUDIES is dedicated to that open field that is conventionally called Humanities. The term is old; it comes from the philosophical and literary studies that prepare the Italian and European Renaissance, or, more precisely, from the Italian humanists of the fifteenth century, who turned to the Greek and Latin heritage with emphasis on the so-called human faculties: thought, memory, imagination, language, moral conscience; hence the multiplicity nestled at the core of the Human Sciences.

We have kept the name, Humanities, to characterize the dossier of this issue. The reader will find texts sitting on the boundary between literary theory and the history of mentalities; or between sociology and semantics. The cross-cutting approaches that go beyond the confines of specialized sciences are part of the program of the Institute of Advanced Studies, which the journal aims to develop and disseminate.

In this archipelago of methodological topics and trends, two particularly dense symbolic formations of form and meaning have deserved special attention: Literature and Music. Examples of the first are the texts on very important Brazilian writers such as Clarice Lispector, Cyro dos Anjos and Osman Lins. The essays on Goethe, in his curious relationship with the "Brazilian" Martius and his no less fascinating intersection with the natural sciences open the dossier to the transnational horizons of Literature, which are also revealed in the exegesis of a vibrant Cuban poet, Lezama Lima. Shifting from the world of creation to that of the institutions that support it, two prominent landmarks of learned culture among us have also been highlighted: the National Library and Tempo Brasileiro.

Music and poetry are combined in the journal's tribute to a poet who honored the IEA as a visiting researcher, José Paulo Paes. And Brazilian popular music lovers will find articles dedicated to the viola, to the mottos of our folk tradition, and to the relationship between samba de roda and Brazilian Popular Music (MPB) with critical moments in our political history.

And as there are no Humanities without people, the dossier includes texts on intellectuals who gave their word a sense of ethics and political resistance: Joaquim Nabucco and Eric Hobsbawm.

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  23 Aug 2010
• Date of issue
  2010