RILE V Presentation

Abstract

At a time when we are publishing our fifth issue, we are experiencing a period of redefinition of our intellectual activities, as the COVID-19 pandemic continues to spread in most parts of the world, tragically affecting people’s lives, health, and livelihood. Much will be said, debated, and discussed about the nature and origin of this pandemic and, above all, perhaps we would have to live for months to come, if not years under the impact of this unspeakable occurrence of overwhelming proportions. Both from the factual point of view, due to the number of bodies that spread throughout the Americas and the rest of the world, and from the psychological point of view, we are all impacted. From a psychological point of view, those living recollected in their own solitude, began to mull over their fears under the threat of an invisible agency who calls humanity to reason, in an indisputable way, to re-consider and thereby re-negotiate our relationship with the environment. Meanwhile, time is pressing for all those who have found refuge in intellectual exercises. Thus, while we seek the comfort of words, we send our condolences in memory of the dead, and to all who have lost their friends and their loved ones. After all, life is nothing more than the sum of a surprising sequence of events of an existential nature, in which, we either win or lose until our trajectory on the planet is consummated. In this intermezzo are the words spoken or written of which we are the craftsmen. We always live in the hope of good messages, especially those that lead us to a permanent assessment of ourselves and our actions, with actions that can transform us into better human beings. New narratives and discussions have come and would come. Among them, already in this issue, we favor the introduction of the theme 'pandemic', as are the articles by Fritoj Capra, whose excellence and timeliness are indisputable, and the reading of Edgar Allan Poe's short story, 'The Mask of the Red Death' ( 1846), remembered in a timely manner, at this moment, according to the perspective of Sueli Liebig. Animesh Roy's reading of Robert Barclay novel Melal: A Novel of the Pacific responds critically to the challenge proposed by the novel, by bringing to public visibility the fictionalization of little-discussed socio-political and cultural issues of Pacific nuclearization, the criminal military incursions of the United States against the indigenous environment perpetrated in the 1950s, in the Bikini Atoll of the Marshall Islands in the  Pacific Ocean. Patrícia Vieira's provocative text brings together, through a careful reading, the theme 'Amazon', through the cinema, through the eyes of national and international directors. The text demonstrates the usual and blissful correlation between literature and cinema, especially focusing on aspects related to ecocinema. Ronilson Lopes and Heloísa Correira defend, in their text, the curious hypothesis in which they demonstrate that the exercise of textual anthropocentrism over organic subjects is predominantly instigated by first-person narrators, as a textual dynamics, especially in the novel Des / Encontro (2011) by JoãoUilson Vieira. Suênio Stevenson discusses, in general terms, the impasse created by the term ecocritic in the Brazilian context, especially when he proposes it as a methodological “innovation”, from the point of view of the subject, in a category called 'narrative scholarship', used by the Anglo-Saxon academy, to legitimize a story with an “apparently subjective language of narration, to reveal a shared human experience of ideas, texts, social realities and the physical world”. Concluding the proposal for this issue, Juarez Lins proposes a study of the relationship between human beings and the environment in the poem ‘PregãoTurístico do Recife’ by João Cabral de MeloNeto. Juarez names the text as having ideal elements, not only aesthetic but also ethical, capable of collaborating positively to “form conscious subjects, who understand the value of participation in change and the need to reconstruct environmental attitudes”. In this way, he demonstrates that environmental issues have always been present in national letters as a priority for our traditional modernists.

                                                                Zelia M.Bora