Short Bio
Jobst Welge is Professor of Romance Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Leipzig, with a special focus on the Spanish and Portuguese areas. He is the author of the study Genealogical Fictions: Cultural Periphery and Historical Change in the Modern Novel (Baltimore, 2015) and co-editor of the volumes Literary Landscapes of Time (Berlin, 2022); Family Constellations in Contemporary Ibero-American and Slavic Literatures (Berlin, 2024). He is generally interested in the theory and history of the novel, the cultural and literary history of the Baroque as well as the avantgardes in Ibero-American contexts. He has also published a series of essays on modern Italian authors (Verga, Marinetti, Svevo, Malaparte).
Project for the Network
A Brazilian Poet in Rome: Murilo Mendes and Inter-Cultural Networks
The Brazilian poet Murilo Mendes (1901-1975), today recognized as an important representative of modernismo, lived in Italy and Rome for an extended period (1957-1975), working as a professor for Brazilian culture at La Sapienza, Rome, and later in Pisa. Mendes was one of the most cosmopolitan Brazilian artists of the twentieth-century and his Italian sojourn deeply influenced the production and reception of his literary work.
Building on previous research (M. B. Amoroso, 2013), the project has two principal aims. Firstly, to trace the profound influence of Italian culture, literature, and art on Mendes’ work, including the role of Italian landscape or the idea of a multilingual poetics in his writings (for instance, the volume Ipotesi, 1977, was written entirely in Italian). Secondly, to study the concrete and material circumstances of Mendes’ cultural contacts in post-war Rome/Italy, as part of larger networks of Italo-Brazilian relations and circulations. In this respect, special attention will be paid to his interaction with institutions, artists, questions of translation (for instance, by G. Ungaretti—who himself had taught at the University of São Paulo, 1936-42), or Mendes’ close contact with a major scholar of Lusophone literature, Luciana Stegagno Picchio (1920-2008).