Concrete art and poetry — an avant-garde movement in which the visual and spatial arrangement of words on a page is as important as the literal meaning of the text — burst onto Brazil’s cultural stage in the 1950s, while the country was embarking on a dizzying period of modernization. Nathaniel Wolfson (Spanish & Portuguese) shows that concretism was hardly socially inert, as scholars have suggested. Rather, he argues that the movement should be seen as the quintessential literary genre of the early information age.

He is joined by Mark Goble (English).