Poetic Circuits: Writing under the Sign of Dictatorship in Postwar Brazil

Nathaniel Wolfson
Spanish and Portuguese
UC Berkeley

My book project, “Poetic Circuits: Writing under the Sign of Dictatorship in Postwar Brazil,” offers the first monograph-length analysis of poetry and politics during Brazil’s post-war military regime (1964-1985). Poetic Circuits provides a new political and aesthetic understanding of communication technologies in Brazilian culture, offering fresh readings of lauded and lesser-known authors, and expands the archive of an emerging trans-disciplinary field of new media studies. Focusing on how poets articulated the ideological role that technological industrialization played in authoritarian dictatorship in the 1960s and 1970s, I examine how poets invented their own communication technologies, and experimented with artificial intelligence to compose works and became involved in state-run cybernetic projects. This project broadens our understanding of the place of technology in authoritarian regimes, exploring how technology provided Brazil’s postwar dictatorship with a powerful ideological symbol of modernity under the guise of “order and progress,” just as it focuses on the responses of writers who turned to the use of new technologies to structure their works and to hazard strategies to decouple aesthetic inventiveness from technophilic national progress.