issue n\u00ba 87<\/em><\/a>) was born in S\u00e3o Paulo, on August 26, 1936. Son of a seamstress and a railwayman, he grew up in the district of Barra Funda. After graduating in 1960 with a degree in literature from USP, he studied for one year in Florence, Italy. Back in Brazil, he began teaching Italian language and literature at USP, in the Department of Neo-Latin Literature, now the Department of Modern Languages and Literature. In 1971, he transferred to the Department of Classical and Vernacular Languages and Literature, lecturing in Brazilian literature. He became a tenured professor in 1985.<\/p>\nSelf-taught in philosophy, Bosi was a scholar of Italian intellectuals such as Giambattista Vico (1668\u20131744), Benedetto Croce (1866\u20131952), and Antonio Gramsci (1891\u20131937). Building on this conceptual framework, he developed what are considered fundamental analyses on the production of Brazilian authors such as the poet Cruz e Sousa (1861\u20131898), and the writers Lima Barreto (1881\u20131922), Graciliano Ramos (1892\u20131953), Machado de Assis (1839\u20131908) and Jo\u00e3o Ant\u00f4nio (1937\u20131996).<\/p>\n
\u201cBosi proposed a revision of the entire literary and cultural history of Brazil. Attentive to the big ideas, but also the small details, in this dialectic between the large and the small he unveiled different forms and new paths for understanding the Brazilian novel and poetry,\u201d says Marco Americo Lucchesi, a professor at the School of Language and Literature at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), and president of the Brazilian Academy of Letters (ABL). \u201cHe was a ‘Renaissance man,’ he studied with the great masters and historians of Florence, creating an intellectual bridge between Brazil and Italy.\u201d<\/p>\n
An undergraduate student of Bosi, Paulo Martins, now director of the School of Philosophy, Letters and Languages, and Human Sciences (FFLCH-USP), emphasizes that, despite the depth of his thinking Bosi was concerned with writing works that could be understood by all audiences, and not just by experts. As an example he cites Hist\u00f3ria concisa da literatura brasileira<\/em> [A concise history of brazilian literature] (Editora Cultrix, 1970), regarded as the most enduring textbook on Brazilian literature to date, written by Bosi at the age of 34. A reference work for both undergraduate students and literature researchers, the book is now in its 52nd edition. In Martin’s assessment, \u201cThe work summarizes the trajectory of Brazilian literature in a clear and accessible way, contributing to the discipline’s popularization.”<\/p>\nSergio Alcides Pereira do Amaral, from the School of Language and Literature at the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), attributes Bosi’s philosophical soundness and remarkable theoretical capacity to his education in Italian studies. \u201cEven so, he never subordinated the literary work to theoretical issues,\u201d he says. Amaral believes Bosi preserved the freshness and curiosity of being a poetry reader, instilling this attitude in generations of students.<\/p>\n
In addition to the literary field, Martins, from FFLCH-USP, points out Bosi’s political activities, including his activities as a demonstrator in labor movements in Osasco, in Greater S\u00e3o Paulo, during the military dictatorship (1964\u20131985), and his work at the Dom Paulo Evaristo Arns Center for Defense of Human Rights, which he chaired from 1982 to 1984. \u201cBosi was Catholic, and his relationships with the progressive wings of the church and liberation theology resulted in important actions during the country’s re-democratization process,\u201d he recalls.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt’s reductionist to consider him just a critic. His education included knowledge of history and philosophy, as well as literary aesthetics,\u201d adds Fernando Paix\u00e3o, from the Brazilian Studies Institute (IEB-USP). He highlights Bosi\u2019s poetry research, and his studies on the work of Machado de Assis. \u201cIn the case of Dom Casmurro<\/em>, for example, Bosi inserts the work into a universalist tradition, highlighting the narrator’s role of revealing the afflictions common to humanity,\u201d says Paix\u00e3o, who edited several of the researcher’s books while he worked at Editora \u00c1tica. One of them, Machado de Assis: O enigma do olhar<\/em> [Machado de Assis: The enigma of the gaze] (\u00c1tica, 1999), won the Jabuti Prize in the Essay and Biography category.<\/p>\n\u201cIn his analyses of Assis, Bosi offers perspectives anchored in Brazilian history and society, but he also seeks to cast a compassionate light on the author\u2019s characters, revealing their human dimension and showing how both cruel and sublime aspects can coexist within them at the same time,\u201d observes H\u00e9lio de Seixas Guimar\u00e3es, from FFLCH-USP.<\/p>\n
In a statement given via email, Alcides Vila\u00e7a, at FFLCH-USP, recalled his first exposure to Bosi during the professor’s course on Modernism, in 1971. \u201cAll the information, attributions, and nodal relationships between the subjects dealt with\u2014with the literature at the center, but always in the perspective of connected relationships\u2014were energized with a tacit commitment to the construction of life,\u201d Vila\u00e7a writes.<\/p>\n
For Alcir P\u00e9cora, from the UNICAMP Institute for Language Studies (IEL), Bosi was an intellectual capable of tackling any subject in Brazilian literary history, and had an intellect that was \u201cbalanced, conciliatory, and never sectarian.” \u201cThis ecumenical vision gave him a very effective type of institutional energy he used for consolidating several important projects throughout USP,\u201d he observes, pointing out Bosi’s involvement in the creation of the Institute for Advanced Studies (IEA), where he served both as director (1998\u20132001 ) and deputy director (1987\u20131997), and was for 30 years the editor of the journal Estudos Avan\u00e7ados<\/em>. P\u00e9cora also calls attention to the research Bosi conducted in the field of colonial literature and, in particular, Jesuit literature.<\/p>\nIn 1996, the researcher was awarded the Order of Rio Branco and, in 2003, he became the seventh occupant of Chair No. 12 of the Brazilian Academy of Letters. After a marriage of 57 years to psychologist Ecl\u00e9a Bosi (see<\/em> Pesquisa FAPESP issue no. 218<\/em>), a professor at the USP Institute of Psychology (IP), Bosi was profoundly impacted by her death in 2017, Paix\u00e3o observes. \u201cHis health weakened, and he began to let his literary activities fall away. Even so, perhaps because of his relationship with Catholicism, he displayed a hopeful attitude and didn’t let it paralyze him.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Based on a solid philosophical framework, Alfredo Bosi proposed a revision of the literary and cultural history of Brazil","protected":false},"author":601,"featured_media":401247,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1348],"tags":[245,233],"coauthors":[1600],"class_list":["post-397850","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-obituary","tag-literature","tag-philosophy"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/397850","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/601"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=397850"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/397850\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":401873,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/397850\/revisions\/401873"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/401247"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=397850"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=397850"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=397850"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=397850"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}