Wednesday night, about 20 students and professors gathered to commemorate the life and works of the famous Brazilian author Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis at the Machado 100.
De Assis was "the founder of the [Brazilian] Academy of Letters. He is all in all the father of Brazilian literature. He is considered the foundation in Brazilian letters. If you say Brazil and literature, he's the guy," Mariano Humeniuk, Penn State Americanists president, said.
The Machado 100 was sponsored by the Penn State Americanists and the departments of African and African-American Studies, Comparative Literature, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese. It was held because the 100 anniversary of de Assis' death was this week.
"It's not so much a commemoration of his passing away but a celebration of his life's works," Humeniuk (graduate-comparative literature) said during the opening introductions of the evening.
The evening was marked by several readings from passages of de Assis' works. One read from several times was the 160-chapter novel Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas.
"What's so groundbreaking about it, the novel is being written by an author in the afterlife ... He tells you about his life and society in general. The book is great because it's so rich it could be categorized as a romantic novel, a realist novel, a naturalist novel," Humeniuk said.
Rhett McNeil (graduate-comparative literature) presented de Assis' bio-biography.
McNeil said while not much is know of de Assis' early life, they do know he did not complete grammar school. Instead, he taught himself.
There were also two short lectures on how to teach de Assis' works.
Djelal Kadir, professor of comparative literature, spoke about the Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas and said the novel "teaches itself."
"It has elements that are self-reflexive. It engages the reader while reading. It is what we call meta-narrative. It narrates about narration, it tells a story about a story being told," Kadir said.
Attendees found the Machado 100 to be interesting and informative.
"I think it's great. It was very interesting to see about his family background. It's really pleasurable and obviously very interesting and has a lot of scholarly value," Bill Schraufnagel (graduate-rhetoric and composition) said.
Adriana Felix-Salgado (sophomore-industrial engineering) came because she is taking Elementary Portuguese I.
"I'm definitely interested in the culture along with the language," she said.
Dawn Taylor (graduate-comparative literature) said de Assis is her main interest and area of study.
"He was ahead of his time in his writing. He was a modernist before modernism really existed," she said.
