About

José Luiz Passos is a Professor of Luso-Brazilian Literatures and Cultures at UCLA. He received his Ph.D. in Hispanic Languages and Literatures from UCLA in 1998 and has held a tenured appointment at UC Berkeley prior to joining UCLA in 2008. He was the inaugural director of the UCLA Center for Brazilian Studies from 2008 to 2011. His research interests include Portuguese and Brazilian narrative, Machado de Assis, contemporary fiction, and travel in the nineteenth century. Passos is the author of several books, including 'Ruínas de linhas puras', which discusses Mário de Andrade and Brazilian modernism, and 'Romance com pessoas', which interprets Shakespeare’s influence on Machado de Assis’s realist fiction. He has published two novels, 'Nosso grão mais fino' and 'O sonâmbulo amador', the latter being a finalist for the São Paulo Prize and winner of the Portugal Telecom Literary Prize and the Brasília Literary Prize. Additionally, he has authored a stage play and short stories published in various countries. His current academic focus involves contemporary fiction, Machado de Assis, and travel in the nineteenth century.

Research topics

• Humanities
• Art
• Philosophy
• Sociology
• Literature

Selected publications

• The Lonely Sailor

  University of Hawaii Press eBooks · 2019-08-24

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The Lonely Sailor

  Mānoa/Mānoa · 2018-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The Style of Dogs

  Luso-Brazilian Review · 2017-12-01 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Realism and moral reasoning: an analysis of Machado de Assis' criticism of Eça de Queiroz

  Estudos portugueses e africanos · 2016-10-19

  article1st authorCorresponding
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• Literaturas latinoamericanas: historia y crítica

  Americanae (AECID Library) · 2015-03-11

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  DOAJ is a unique and extensive index of diverse open access journals from around the world, driven by a growing community, committed to ensuring quality content is freely available online for everyone.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Machado de Assis, moral imagination and the novel

  Machado de Assis em Linha · 2014-06-01 · 3 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  The article discusses the premise behind binding literary value to the ability a work has to yield socio-historical information, prevalent in recent criticism on Machado de Assis. It argues that the body of Machado's work shows an increasing ambivalence regarding the links between imagined lives and history, thus proposing that in his late writings the matching between things real and things represented is a rhetorical and melancholy gesture of great insight. In order to illustrate the prevalence of moral imagination as object and technique in Machado's late novels, the author highlights a few points of contact between Machado de Assis and Henry James, contemporaries and akin in their literary sensibilities.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Editorial

  Machado de Assis em Linha · 2014-06-01

  editorialOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• HYBRIS: Retórica da Sedução ou Força da Explicação Ambivalente?

  LA Referencia (Red Federada de Repositorios Institucionales de Publicaciones Científicas) · 2014-04-10

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

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• Brazil

  The Encyclopedia of the Novel · 2010-12-24

  other1st authorCorresponding

  The Brazilian novel comes from and still feeds on the desire to make sense of the mixing of social spaces and the fate of those who have shapedmoments of contact amongunequals. The quest for change and fitting in is often presented retrospectively, and in many cases it results in a search for puzzling family ties. From its beginnings to recent prizewinning works, one can chart across time how plots, structures, trends, authors, and their readership have relied on an intricate interplay between displacement, troubled origins, and the possibilities for a new self. Typically, social exile—or a journey if within the protagonist's own community—is paired with the ubiquity of an absent father figure. The conflict between past expectations and the limited opportunities protagonists have to reconnect or fulfill their hopes yields the grounds for the negotiation between opposing agendas: formal and colloquial registers, highbrow and lowbrow cultures, urban and regional spaces. Time and again the Brazilian novel reinvents the quest of Telemachus as a way of probing nationality, affective loss, and social compromise.

  PublisherDOI

• O Mal e a Metamorfose em Machado de Assis

  Luso-Brazilian Review · 2009-06-01 · 4 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract It has become commonplace to describe Machado de Assis’s characters and narrators as deeper than those of his contemporaries, and his novels as representations more creatively ambiguous than most literary depictions of nineteenth-century Brazil. In this essay I argue that throughout his novels psychological depth is a function of moral imagination; and a troubled moral imagination is a necessary condition for the literary representation of the modern self. Machado’s protagonists are able to fashion the public presentation of their selves by imagining alternatives to their origins, desires, and social predicaments. They have in their pasts a burden they need to overcome, and while doing so they find themselves in conditions of freedom and harm. Evil then arises as a consequence of moral dynamism, in so far as it becomes a project for undoing the other. The genesis of a radical conception of free will and evil in Machado’s narratives goes back to his translation of Victor Hugo’s The Toilers of the Sea (1866). His concern with a more meticulous characterization of inwardness deepens between Iaiá Garcia (1878) and Dom Casmurro (1899), when adopting the structure of a confessional narrative he arrives at a balance between disguised motives (malice), double chronology (nostalgia), and human life as an unfolding, reversible, and self-aware process (metamorphosis). To frame Machado’s strategy for depicting moral change, I take from Augustine’s Confessions the suggestion that retrospection is the only way of restoring the identity of someone whose self is marked by his or her sense of dissimilarity with the past. Finally, from Kant and Paul Ricoeur I draw the elements for a further consideration of evil as an invitation to think differently about seeing, judging, and narrating human life.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Klaus-Dieter Ertler

  University of Graz

  1 shared

• Juan M. Vitulli

  1 shared

• Frauke Gewecke

  1 shared

• Hans-Otto Dill

  Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

  1 shared

• Ineke Phaf-Rheinberger

  1 shared

• Giuseppe Bellini

  Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP)

  1 shared

• Julio Peñate Rivero

  1 shared

• Andrea Gremels

  Goethe University Frankfurt

  1 shared

Education

• MA/PhD, Spanish and Portuguese

  UCLA

  1998

• Bacharel em Ciências Sociais, Departamento de Ciências Sociais

  Universidade Federal de Pernambuco

  1994

Awards & honors

• 2013 Portugal Telecom Literary Prize for best novel
• 2014 Brasília Literary Prize for best novel