Astúcias de Penélope

Penelope's cunning: Sergio Buarque reads Claudio

Abstract

A reflection on the limits and possibilities of a radical historicist approach of the literary past, this article discusses the outstanding analysis of a Claudio Manuel da Costa’ s sonnet by Sérgio Buarque de Holanda, taking as a point of departure the tensions between, on the one hand, the commitment to do justice to the set of expectations of the period and, on the other, the difficult to stablish a final contextual frame able to encompass the dense net of allusions lurking the poem. To explore the rhetorical and theoretic implications of these and other dead-locks is what one intends to do in the present article.

 Reading, cultural memory, temporality.