Earl E. Fitz

Professor of Portuguese, Spanish, and Comp. Lit; Affiliate Faculty, Center for Lat.Am. Studies

Earl E. Fitz Professor of Portuguese, Spanish, and Comparative Literature Affiliated faculty: Center for Latin American Studies

Areas of specialization: Brazilian literature (especially Clarice Lispector and Machado de Assis); Comparative Literature; Spanish American literature; comparative approaches to Brazilian and Spanish American literature; inter-American literary studies; theory and practice of translation; New World literary history.

Earl E. Fitz received his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the City University of New York in 1977. His principal languages of concentration were Portuguese, Spanish, French, English, and German while his primary national literatures were those of Brazil, Spanish America, the United States, and Canada. As a doctoral student, Professor Fitz studied translation, Brazilian literature, and Spanish American literature with Gregory Rabassa, his mentor. As a Professor of Portuguese, Spanish, and Comparative Literature at Vanderbilt University, Professor Fitz has pioneered the application of comparative methodologies to the study of both Brazilian and Spanish American letters, the use of literature written in Spanish and Portuguese to comparative scholarship, and to the establishment of a new Ph.D. track concentrating on inter-American literary study. Professor Fitz also encourages a comparative approach to the literatures of Spain and Portugal and to the development of Comparative Iberian Studies as an emerging field. Professor Fitz is the author of a number of articles and books, including Rediscovering the New World: Inter-American Literature in a Comparative Context, Ambiguity and Gender in the New Novel of Brazil and Spanish America: A Comparative Assessment (co-authored with Judith A. Payne), Sexuality and Being in the Poststructuralist Universe of Clarice Lispector, Brazilian Narrative Traditions in a Comparative Context, and (co-authored with Elizabeth Lowe) Translation and the Rise of Inter-American Literature. His most recent projects involve the completion of a comparative history of inter-American literature, a study of the Borges translation of Faulkner’s The Wild Palms, and an essay on Machado de Assis, Borges, and Clarice Lispector that offers a new, more comparative evaluation of Latin America’s renowned “New Narrative.”