Introduction

This issue of Was de Desterro is an outgrowth of a seminar

entitled "The Open Road: Three Centuries of American Literature

and Culture", held at UFSC from July 14 to July 18, 198e. The

seminar was produced by UFSC's pOs-graduageo program in Linguas e

Literaturas Estrangeiras, it was chaired by Sergio Bellei and was

supported in all its stages of planning by the Fulbright Commission

and its Executive Secretary Marco Antonio da Rocha, by USIS,

represented by John Matel in Porto Alegre, by Alvin Cohen in
Brasilia and especially through the vivacious advocacy of Maureen

Taylor, whose death we have lamented in these pages.

Our intention in the seminar was to spread as large a net

as possible around this vast beast American Culture and to that end

we invited distinguished professors Townsend Ludington from the

University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill and Michael Zuckerman

of the University of Pennsylvania. They are represented in these

pages by Prof. Ludington's essay on John Dos Passos and his

relationships to Portuguese-speaking culture and to Brazil and by

Prof. Zuckerman's essay on American history-writing about the

Founding Fathers.

We also invited the Fulbright Professors then present in

Brazil -- Cruce Stark of UFSC who declaimed a paper on the function

ILRA DO DESTERRO, N9s 15 e 16 - 19 e 29 semestres de 1986.

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of landscape in The Great Gatsby and The Scarlet Letter and Terry

Caesar of UFRJ who spoke on the genre of travel writing in the

developing years of the travel industry. John McElroy, also a

Fulbright Professor at UFSC, delivered a paper at the seminar but

is not represented here.

Brazilian faculty came from all over Brazil: Paulo Gick

and Rita i Schmidt came from Porto Alegre and spoke about Benjamin

Franklin and William Faulkner; Leticia Cavalcanti came from Joao

Pessoa and spoke on Saul Bellow.

The UFSC faculty who hosted the seminar are represented

here by essays from Sergio Bellei, the Seminar director, on

strategies of reading based on an examination of Alceu Amoroso Lima

and Henfil, the cartoonist, by Bernadete Pasold, who compares The

Grapes of Wrath and Caned, by Susana Funck, who examines The Fixer,

The Centaur and Henderson The Rain King, and finally by Arnold

Gordenstein, the editor of this special issue who spoke on a

reading of Eugene O'Neill.

Present at the seminar were about seventy participants from

all over Brazil. Discussions were lively if polite. One culminated

in a broken chair -- the critic's effort to illustrate the use of

a deconstructionist technique. Some effort was made to connect

American and Brazilian cultures; as often happens, the Americans

were more critical of America and more supportive of Brazil than

the Brazilians -- and the Brazilians were the reverse.

The present issue ends with a bibliography of basic

background books for the study of American culture. More narrow or

more deep bibliographic suggestions can be found in The Literary

History of the United States or (for the nineteenth century)

Norton's Eight Great Writers.

Arnold Gordenstein

UFSC

The editors of ILHA DO DESTERRO wish to express an especial

thanks to Susana B. Funck without whose hawk-eyed editorial skills

this issue would not be nearly as perfict.

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