Missing Brazil

Abstract

The following text was written, in the form of tribute and greeting, in the granting ceremony of Professor Emeritus to Professor Marlyse Meyer at the Faculty of Philosophy, Letters and Human Sciences of the University of São Paulo, on April 16, 2009. Imagination and reality; reality and imaginary. These are the territories through which the research and work of Marlyse Meyer travelled. It is a difficult task to census her intellectual trajectory. Reconstructing intellectual profiles demands, along with specific knowledge, many of which are nurtured in personal contact with subjects, the discovery of a common thread that allows aligning chronologies and historical temporalities, whether research, interest in themes or questions, or even those of opportunities for the production and editing of texts followed by their publications. Marlyse presents long pages establishing connections between social changes and cultural production. Changes in the newspaper and book market, in the effects of industrialization and urbanization on consumption habits among social classes, in the emergence of new classes that emerged from the factory workers, in the sometimes repressive and sometimes liberalizing conjunctures through which French political history passed, seem to entangle the cultural production. Faithful to the “objects” to which he focused, his extensive research activity reveals itself to be authentic in the fragments, in the dispersion, in the discontinuity, in the looks through labyrinths and back corners, in the plurality of original sources of investigation regarding the roots of our culture and of our literary traditions.