WHY JOÃO CEZAR DE CASTRO ROCHA’S WRITING MATTERS – NOT ONLY TO ME

Abstract

In his most recent book “Leituras Desauratizadas: Tempos Precários, Ensaios Provisórios,” João Cezar de Castro Rocha talks about some of the authors and topics that have emerged as most central in his work over the past two decades: about Machado de Assis and about Shakespeare, about cultural journalism and chess, about museums and about the present state of Literary Criticism. But in spite of the innovative perspectives that he wrests from his subject matters, the book is above all a quest for new forms, more precisely a quest and an experiment about new forms of writing through which Literary Criticism and the Humanities at large could, in the future, engage with a new extra-academic readership and thus also make a (perhaps decisive) contribution toward their own institutional and intellectual survival.