Presentation
Literary Studies promote reflection on the processes of symbolization of the world we live in; its main point is imagination and its devices. Literature is a culturally organized form of work that materializes and operates in the arts and in the different textualities that permeate the modern and contemporary social space. The teaching and research work developed in the Graduate Program in Literature (PPGLit) understands texts as marks or symptoms in which conflicts, contrasts and guidelines emerge to be considered and studied under different disciplinary perspectives, which are articulated in a network that notably involves Literature, Visual Arts, Cinema and Performing Arts, Anthropology, Philosophy, and Historiography. In this sense, PPGLit’s objective is to train highly qualified professionals in the area of Literature to meet the demands of various Arts and Humanities areas.
In 1991, two decades after the inception of PPGLit at the Master’s level, and as a result of an internal restructuring process initiated in 1988, a second area of research in Literary Theory was introduced at Master’s level and authorized on 6 October 1993, by the Federal Council of Education (CFE/CESu/n.609/1993). Finally, in 1997, the Doctoral Program in Literary Theory was created, shaping the current Graduate Program in Literature at the master’s and doctoral degree levels. The PPGLit completed 48 years of existence in 2018 and, since its establishment, it has been considered a program of excellence by CAPES. When the evaluation was based on a letter grade scale, PPGLit always obtained grade A. As the evaluation changed to a numerical grade scale, the program achieved grade 5 (out of 7).
During its 48 years of existence, the Graduate Program in Literature has awarded more than 600 Master’s and 300 Doctoral degrees. Dissertations and theses are listed in the UFSC’s Central Library website.
The Program has two scientific journals: Travessia, which was restructured after 2003 and it is now published under the name Outra Travessia, bringing the theoretical debates developed within PPGLit and ranked by Capes as a B1 journal; and Anuário de Literatura, which is mostly aimed at students’ production and is ranked by Capes as a B2 journal. These publications are available on the UFSC Journal Portal: http://www.periodicos.ufsc.br
The PPGLit has been expanding its faculty body, resulting in an increase in the number of research lines carried out in the Program. In its scope, the program is not only concerned with the addition of knowledge, but with the transformation of practices, the metamorphosis of critical intervention. On the one hand, it is a matter of questioning the tradition that exists across fields without, however, changing the theoretical field, but rather reiterating implicit key concepts. On the other hand, it is a matter of changing the conceptual space in a discontinuous but consistent way, stepping outside the traditionally crystallized disciplinary field, in order to affirm distrust within it.
Seeking to respond to its current internal demands, PPGLit established a broad curriculum restructuring process in 2011, including the proposal and approval of a new regulation for the accreditation and re-accreditation of faculty members, fully in accordance with CAPES evaluation committee guidelines. The Program’s lines of research and fields of expertise were also restructured. It is important to note that these changes did not come abruptly, much less arbitrarily or authoritatively. They stemmed from a slow process of historical and literary readings and re-readings of the works of each PPGLit senior professor, adding, little by little, the research contributions of the younger professors and broadening and building the new spectrum of the PPGLit professional qualifications. Thus, the Program consolidated its aim to train professionals with new profiles, which are suitable for meeting the social complexities, in order to teach, do high-quality research and work in the various fields of culture.
Student Profile
Due to its interdisciplinary nature, created by the growth, productivity and expansion of its faculty over the last few years, PPGLit has admitted students from various disciplinary fields who, in turn, received an interdisciplinary education that ranges across different fields of Arts and Humanities. Even when the PPGLit alumni from other areas return to their previous areas of knowledge, they do so with a new profile. It is worth mentioning that the program has received students from fields of Arts and Humanities such as Anthropology, Philosophy, History, Law, Performing Arts, Cinema, Visual Arts, and Music. Professionals from the Literature field also receive a wide and diversified training and education, allowing them to promote renovated practices in the area.
Alumni Profiles
The PPGLit students will be taught contents and skills that will allow them to work as researchers, culture-related professionals and teachers who are able to deal with the complexity of the contemporary cultural scene and its symbolic space, where artistic languages require other theoretical developments fostered by previous traditions which, in turn, are not exempt from the effect of the continuous flow of events. The alumni of the Graduate Program in Literature will continue to produce in their practices a strong theoretical intervention, to which different fields of knowledge converge. Therefore, in the process of restructuring its lines of research, PPGLit sought to encourage in its new professionals an innovative character that allows for cultural interventions in their production, paralled by a creative profile, insofar as their thought is conceived as performance or experience, rather than only as a scholarly articulation of the previously established areas. Alumni should be aware of the risk of being caught by a type of reinstallation that takes them back to the very interior of what they aspired to be away from. Because of this “inter” and “intra” disciplinary profile, the Graduate Program in Literature will spark the interest of graduates from universities located in several regions of the state of Santa Catarina, from Brazil, and from all over the world.
