Vinicius Castro

I was born in Brasília, in 1988. Before coming to Dartmouth for the M.A. program, I published a novel and got a law degree at the University of Brasília. My senior thesis was about some mythical aspects of Brazil's Federal Constitution'.

My research here at Dartmouth is on the aesthetic and dramatic aspects of critical rhetoric in writers like Barthes, Foucault and Derrida (specially in texts that either kill or dissect "The Author"), an attempt to make some sense of the very amusing U.S. textual phenomenon largely called 'Theory' and its    overwhelming impact on the humanities in the last few decades. The set-up for this literary reading of critique is largely organized around the works of Jorge Luis Borges and Kenneth Burke, as well as on a tentative understanding that hermeneutics, much like shamanism, is a matter of the production of the dead for the production of the living.

I have worked as a Multi-lingual Assistant for a couple of classes in the Portuguese department in the fall and winter terms. My academic interests are kind of all over the place, but primarily they tend to hover around the relations between myth, metaphor and social rhetoric. As of late I have been working with Burke, Northrop Frye, Viveiros de Castro, Lévi-Strauss, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Paul Ricoeur, Giambattista Vico and Wallace Stevens. I also think Henry James is the greatest fiction critic that has ever lived.

As far as plans for the future go, I am not yet sure if I will be pursuing a PHD immediately after the M.A, but I do hope to eventually have an academic career of some sort.