Sumários
Miguel Torga: Sesame
10 Novembro 2016, 10:00 • Helena Carvalhão Buescu
The relevance of Miguel Torga's biography (both his regional origin and his choice of profession) for understanding his humanist literary work as well as his choice of pseudonym.
Reading and discussion of the short story "Sesame" (in Tales from the Mountain) and of its polysemic title (a reference to a cereal and to rural wealth; an incantation formula with a cultural meaning; an intertextual dialogue with Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves). Notions of time (chronological/psychological); space (small villages' connections with tales and legends); characters (individual/collective); narrator, narration and language (simplicity and regionalisms); symbologies (the cave, spinning, weaving and knitting); themes (innocence and disillusion, learning, integration and community; reality/fantasy, local/global); and moral of the story (magic is in everyday life rather than in fiction/imagination).
Screening of a segment ("The Sorcerer's Apprentice") of Fantasia (1999, animation film) to discuss the concept of hybris, the connection between storytelling and magic and another representation of the idea that imagination isn't always better than reality.
The figure and importance of the storyteller according to Walter Benjamin (excerpts from "The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov", 1936).
Fernando Pessoa: Ricardo Reis and Alberto Caeiro
8 Novembro 2016, 10:00 • Helena Carvalhão Buescu
Ricardo Reis as a representative of intellectualism and as a follower of philosophical (stoicism, epicurism) and literary (Horatian odes) traditions from Classical Antiquity. A poetry of 'control' in form and expression. The awareness of time and death as Man's greatest problem.
Alberto Caeiro as a representative of empiricism and as a follower of the tradition of pastoral melancholy. A poetry of 'complexity of the simple': an apparent and ironic simplicity that conceals the fact that he is a programatic poet - his program is to tell us not to think, which constitutes a program nevertheless.
Reading and discussion of "Not just those who envy and hate us", "Fruits are given by trees that live" and "Whise the man who's content with the world's spectacle" by Ricardo Reis; "II" and "XLIII" (from The Keeper of Sheep), "You say I'm something more" (from Uncollected Poems) by Alberto Caeiro.
Fernando Pessoa (and all his (semi-)heteronyms) as an intellectual (ideas) rather than sentimental (feelings) poet.
Fernando Pessoa: Bernando Soares (The Book of Disquiet) and Álvaro de Campos (Selected Poetry)
3 Novembro 2016, 10:00 • Helena Carvalhão Buescu
An introduction on Bernardo Soares' fictional biography, style and philosophical perspectives (shared with the orthonym).
Reading and discussion of "Fragments 70, 297, 406, 407" from The Book of Disquiet by the semi-heteronym Bernando Soares; "Lisbon Revisited (1926)" and "Salutation to Walt Whitman" by the heteronym Álvaro de Campos.The Book of Disquiet as "a factless autobiography" (Fernando Pessoa), the compensation for an uneventful daily life with a boundless imagination: the Rückenfigur as the representation of the anonymous modern city but also as a gateway to another reality; the incidental pedestrians as reflections of the philosophical and literary concept of "contingency"; the passage from objective observation of reality to the exploration of feelings and epiphanies; the absurdity of life (a dead end); the incompatibility between knowledge/conscience and happiness; the modern(ist) problem of time being reduced to the Present.
Álvaro de Campos' theatrical singing of machinery (an epic of modern life in direct relation to Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass) in contrast with his melancholic desire to be everything and everyone else; his final sense of failure towards knowing how to connect with reality.
Fernando Pessoa: orthonym (Songbook and Message)
27 Outubro 2016, 10:00 • Helena Carvalhão Buescu
An introductory biographical note on Fernando Pessoa.
The process of heteronomy (depersonalization and multiplicity), some philosophical (Gnoseology and the Rückenfigur) and literary (Baudelaire) influences; the concept of the painful interval (gap between the subject who knows and the object/world he wants to know) and an intertextual relationship (by comparison and confrontation) with Camões' The Lusiads.
Reading and discussion of "Pedrouços", "Autopsychography" and "O cat playing in the street" (from Songbook); "Coat of Arms: The Castles" and "The Sea Monster" (from Message).