Books and Special Issues
Authored Books
Against the Current: Electricity, Environment, and Culture in Brazil. Forthcoming with the MIT Press in the Spring of 2027.
A timely and measured account of electricity’s material and aesthetic impact on Brazilian culture.
Electricity has become an inescapable structuring force in modern life. Electrification has also been proposed as possible solution to fossil-fuel driven environmental crisis. But for all its promises, electrification has material demands. Against the Current examines electricity as an overlooked yet pivotal force in twentieth-century Brazilian aesthetics. Focusing on moments in which electricity’s presence or absence erupt into works of literature, film, visual arts, theater, and music, Victoria Saramago shines a light on the promises and pitfalls of electricity, in turn illuminating the characteristic tensions of the Anthropocene. Brazil’s uneven history of electrification is based on one of the highest rates of renewable energy generation in the world. Brazilian cultural production has been keenly aware of the contradictions of electrification’s material promises and demands. This book shows how electricity is the hidden undercurrent of the most iconic turns in twentieth-century Brazilian history—from anthropophagy to the sertão, and from the dictatorship to dams—and proposes a new understanding of Brazilian aesthetics as inextricably intertwined with debates about energy
Fictional Environments: Mimesis, Deforestation, and Development in Latin America. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2021.
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- Roberto Reis Book Award for a First Monograph, Brazilian Studies Association (2022)
- Shortlisted, Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment Book Award (2023)
- Honorable Mention, Antonio Candido Prize, Brazil Section Prize, Latin American Studies Association (2021)
Reviews:
Charlotte Rogers, Revista de Estudios Hispánicos 55.3 (2021); Pedro Lopes de Almeida, Brasil/Brazil 26.67 (2022); Carolyn Fornoff, Hispanic Review 90.2 (2022); Jobst Welge, Modern Fiction Studies 68.2 (2022)
Fictional Environments: Mimesis, Deforestation, and Development in Latin America investigates how fictional works have become sites for the production of knowledge, imagination, and intervention in Latin American environments. It investigates the dynamic relationship between fictional images and real places, as the lasting representations of forests, rural areas, and deserts in novels clash with collective perceptions of changes like deforestation and urbanization.
From the backlands of Brazil to a developing Rio de Janeiro, and from the rainforests of Venezuela and Peru to the Mexican countryside, rapid deforestation took place in Latin America in the second half of the twentieth century. How do fictional works and other cultural objects dramatize, resist, and intervene in these ecological transformations? Through analyses of work by João Guimarães Rosa, Alejo Carpentier, Juan Rulfo, Clarice Lispector, and Mario Vargas Llosa, Victoria Saramago shows how novels have inspired conservationist initiatives and offered counterpoints to developmentalist policies, and how environmental concerns have informed the agendas of novelists as essayists, politicians, and public intellectuals. This book seeks to understand the role of literary representation, or mimesis, in shaping, sustaining, and negotiating environmental imaginaries during the deep, ongoing transformations that have taken place from the 1950s to the present.
“Saramago gives a new twist to long-standing discussions about the status and function of fictional texts in environmental discourse and criticism, and whether realist and documentary modes are most appropriate for literature on environmental change. Ultimately, her innovative book engages with the more fundamental question of whether fictionality in and of itself gets in the way of ‘environmental messaging.’” —Ursula K. Heise, author of Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species
“Fictional Environments: Mimesis and Deforestation in Latin America makes an important and novel contribution to both Latin American literary history and to environmental humanities independently, and specifically to the incipient but expanding field of Latin American ecocriticism.” —Rachel Price, author of The Object of the Atlantic: Concrete Aesthetics in Cuba, Brazil and Spain 1868-1968 (Northwestern, 2014)
“Wide-ranging, starkly original, and sharp, Fictional Environments is full of brilliant insights on the multiple relationships between writing and ecologies. While revisiting canonical texts and bringing together critical traditions often kept apart, Saramago sheds new light on our understanding of conservation, development, and the rights of nature and fiction, in Latin America and beyond. The book never loses sight of what’s at stake as it reflects on the limits and possibilities of literary creation amid ongoing environmental devastation.” —Bruno Carvalho, author of Porous City: A Cultural History of Rio de Janeiro
O duplo do pai: o filho e a ficção de Cristovão Tezza. São Paulo: É Realizações, 2013.
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Descrição na quarta capa:
O Filho Eterno, O Duplo do Pai: O Filho e a Ficção de Cristovão Tezza é um notável estudo de Victoria Saramago, uma das vozes mais promissoras da crítica e da literatura atuais. A jovem autora apresentou um estudo completo do conjunto da obra de um dos nomes definitivos da literatura brasileira contemporânea, cuja consagração crescente representa o justo reconhecimento de uma literatura que se distingue pela força da linguagem e pela originalidade da visão de mundo de seu autor. De fato, Cristovão Tezza escreveu o romance mais premiado dos últimos anos, O Filho Eterno. Nele, o autor enfrentou um delicado tema autobiográfico: o nascimento de um filho portador da síndrome de Down. Trata-se da história de Felipe, o próprio filho de Tezza. Contudo, o autor desenvolveu uma elaborada estrutura textual que permitiu criar alguma distância entre vida e obra, circunstância existencial e exercício literário, isto é, invenção propriamente linguística. No caso, o inegável impulso autobiográfico foi matizado por um agudo traço estilístico: o texto é dominado por um narrador em terceira pessoa, embora às vezes apareça, aqui e ali, uma “constrangida” voz que evoca um narrador em primeira pessoa. Porém, o predomínio quase absoluto do ponto de vista externo metamorfoseou experiência individual em obra de arte. Na inspirada análise da autora, se o livro possui elos com a tradição clássica do romance de formação, isto é, do Bildungsroman, ao mesmo tempo, o texto de Tezza engendra uma diferença decisiva:”É quando o pai se desliga dos clichês relacionados a Bildung e à juventude na modernidade, é quando abre mão do modelo clássico da formação do artista, é quando enfim se reconhece sem o comando da encenação que fora sua existência até o momento, é aí que a verdadeira Bildung pode afinal ter lugar.”
Co-Edited Volumes
Handbook of Latin American Environmental Aesthetics, co-edited with Jens Andermann and Gabriel Giorgi. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2023.
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The Handbook of Latin American Environmental Aesthetics offers a comprehensive overview of Latin American aesthetic and conceptual production addressing the more-than-human environment at the intersection between art, activism, and critique. Fields include literature, performance, film, and other audiovisual media as well as their interactions with community activisms. Scholars who have helped establish environmental approaches in the field as well as emergent critical voices revisit key concepts such as ecocriticism, (post-)extractivism, and multinaturalism, while opening new avenues of dialogue with areas including critical race theory and ethnicity, energy humanities, queer-*trans studies, and infrastructure studies, among others. This volume both traces these genealogies and maps out key positions in this increasingly central field of Latin Americanism, at the same time as they relate it to the environmental humanities at large.
By showing how artistic and literary productions illuminate critical zones of environmental thought, articulating urgent social and material issues with cultural archives, historical approaches and conceptual interventions, this volume offers cutting-edge critical tools for approaching literature and the arts from new angles that call into question the nature/culture boundary.
Reviews
“This volume is a great pedagogical tool for professors teaching at the intersection of the Environmental Humanities and the Latin American region. It also stands as a useful starting point for Latin Americanists at the beginning of their research careers. Finally, it serves as a comprehensive regional survey for scholars working with comparative and interdisciplinary methodologies. Following the publication of the groundbreaking The Latin American Ecocultural Reader (French & Heffes, Northwestern UP, 2020), this edited volume continues to pave the road toward the consolidation of the field. By shedding light on some difficult questions around both politics and aesthetics, it indexes the virtues and potential pitfalls of environmental studies at a regional scale and the field of ecocriticism at large.”
– Valeria Meiller, ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment (2024), pp. 1–2.
“The Handbook of Latin American Environmental Aesthetics is one of the best conceived reference works I have read. It accomplishes the difficult task of orienting scholars entering the field while challenging experts to understand possibilities yet to be explored. The sophistication and comprehensiveness of the scholarship is impressive, its challenge to sedimented ways of conceiving of aesthetics is clear and pivotal, and its futural orientation, energizing.”
– Omar Rivera, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews (5.12.2025).
“un proyecto fundacional del campo de estudios medioambientales latinoamericanos.”
– Francisco Gerardo Tijerina Martínez, Chasqui 54/2 (2025), p. R2.
“un libro que nos va a acompañar a pensar planetariamente esta crisis y sus representaciones artísticas durante muchos años por delante.”
– Sergio I. Rosas-Romero, Monteagudo. Revista de literatura española, hispanoamericana y teoría de la literatura 31 (2026), p. 331.
Literature Beyond the Human: Post-Anthropocentric Brazil, co-edited with Luca Bacchini. London and New York: Routledge, 2022.
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How can Clarice Lispector’s writings help us make sense of the Anthropocene? How does race intersect with the treatment of animals in the works of Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis? What can Indigenous philosopher and leader Ailton Krenak teach us about the relationship between environmental degradation and the production of knowledge? Literature Beyond the Human is the first collection of essays in English dedicated to an investigation of Brazilian literature from the viewpoint of the environmental humanities, animal studies, Anthropocene studies, and other critical and theoretical perspectives that question the centrality of the human. This volume includes 15 chapters by leading scholars covering two centuries of Brazilian literary production, from Gonçalves Dias to Astrid Cabral, from Euclides da Cunha to Davi Kopenawa, and others. By underscoring the vast theoretical potential of Brazilian literature and thought, from the influential Modernist thesis of “cultural cannibalism” (antropofagia) to the renewed interest in Amerindian perspectivism in culture. Post-Anthropocentric Brazil shows how the theoretical strength of Brazilian thought can contribute to contemporary debates in the anglophone realm.
Co-Edited Special Issues
“Beyond Shores: Aquatic Imaginaries in the Portuguese Speaking World,” co-edited with Leila Lehnen and Patricia Vieira. Journal of Lusophone Studies. In progress.
“The Anthropocene from the Perspective of Historical Analysis,” co-edited with José Augusto Pádua. Topoi: Revista de História, v. 24, n. 54, 2023. Find it here.
“Narratives of the Apocalypse,” co-edited with Chloe Hill. Journal of Lusophone Studies, v. 7, n. 1, 2022. Find it here.