Paulo Freire’s Situação-limite

Abstract

I challenge an “English only” view of Paulo Freire in U.S. scholarship, arguing that an exclusive reading of the 1970 Myra Bergman Ramos English translation masks the dialogic and allusive dimensions of Freire’s rhetoric. I trace Paulo Freire’s use of situação-limite (“limit-situation”) to Álvaro Viera Pinto’s appropriation of the term in Consciência e realidade nacional from Karl Jaspers’s concept of Grenzsituation in Philosophie, Existenzerhellung. A detailed illustration of the semantics of situação-limite is needed to correct for a “glass half full” terministic screen in Anglophone U.S. scholarship, which overly minimizes the term’s profile of collective historical transcendence.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 I would like to thank RR reviewers Drew Kopp and Jaime Armin Mejia for their insightful feedback.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lucas Rossi Corcoran

Lucas Rossi Corcoran is assistant professor of rhetoric and writing studies at San Diego State University.