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Is the substantiation of mass media and electronic technology as cornerstones of contemporary existence worldwide antithetical to lyric or a source of revitalization? Can one be at once more oneself and more a national being through poetic appeals to the selves and signs of potent Others and their locations in the same hemisphere? Do poets feel that they truly expand the reach of their craft by using non-print vehicles, by composing in different languages, or by redefining spaces in relation to alternate territories? Can poems open fresh perspectives on the experience of cybernetic environments? Is the perception of place and changes it undergoes a topic for all genres of present-day literature? Such are the questions that motivate this study of threads of poetry in Brazil in the context of the Americas, especially in relation to the United States. Both historical and on-going connections in lyric between the two countries of continental proportions enfold not only national languages and letters per se, but tourism, film, music, and other aspects of popular culture as well. This nuanced nexus forms its own part of the encompassing array of processes and situations that comprise globalization.
If an overriding concern of intellectual inquiry and critique in the 1980s was to assess the nature and limits of epochal phenomena subsumed under the rubric of postmodernism, in the 1990s and the early twenty-first century imperatives of analysis of human endeavor, or priorities that have driven critical agendas, have been shaped by the subjects of globalization, understood in the most basic sense to mean widespread transnationalization and intensification of integration of different parts of the planet. When this topic came to the fore of public discussion, the predominant perspectives were those of economics and geopolitics. Considerable attention has now been paid as well to institutional implications and ramifications for communities. Cultural dimensions of globalization have been the focus of incisive integral studies in social anthropology and of collections of essays by humanists and theoreticians of discourse. Culture in such approaches most commonly operates according to a "conventional social scientific sense" summarized "as the beliefs, values, and lifestyles of ordinary people in their everyday existence" (Berger 2). Given the central role of mass media in the planetary spread of ideas and products, investigations of...