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This graduate seminar explores the work of the major modernist writer João Guimarães Rosa (1908–1967), with particular attention to Grande sertão: veredas, his only and groundbreaking novel, which is scheduled to receive a new English translation in 2026. First published in Brazil in 1956 and translated into English in 1963 as The Devil to Pay in the Backlands, the novel is frequently compared to the work of James Joyce for its radical experimentation with language. Rosa experimented with narrative form and challenged literary conventions, as well as categories of gender, race, and regional identity. His fiction is almost invariably set in Brazil’s vast inland plateaus, the sertão, a landscape that acquires metaphysical dimensions in his work. In addition to reading Grande sertão: veredas, the seminar will also examine selected short stories alongside established and emerging critical approaches to Rosa’s work, including ecocriticism, regionalist poetics, trans studies, narrative theory, and translation studies. The course is taught in English, with readings in Portuguese, Spanish, and English.