Sumários

Out of class activity

25 Outubro 2016, 10:00 • Helena Carvalhão Buescu

Visit to Casa Fernando Pessoa.

Camilo Pessanha: Selected Poetry

20 Outubro 2016, 10:00 • Helena Carvalhão Buescu

Camilo Pessanha's life and work, between East and West and from Symbolism to Decadentism and early Modernism. 

Reading and discussion of "Images that flicker across the retinas", "Who soiled these linens, who left them stained and torn", "I cannot say if this is love. But if pain grips me", "I saw a light in a lost country.", "If I reflect on the promise", "That overwhelming coldness" and "Ice Sonnet", with guest lecturer and translator Jeffrey Childs.
Intertextual relationship with Charles Baudelaire's "Correspondences" (from The Flowers of Evil) and John Ashbery's "As You Came From The Holy Land" (from Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror).
Main topics: fleetingness, decadence and the end of an era; the second order observer; the senses as a source of knowledge (a more essencial than rational sphere of reality); the creation of a deliberate uncertainty; unatainable lands and unreliable anchors (the desire to escape from self).

Cesário Verde, "The Sentiment of a Westerner"

18 Outubro 2016, 10:00 • Helena Carvalhão Buescu

The structure of the poem, in terms os space (the city of Lisbon) and time (the span of an evening till dawn). The figure of the wanderer (flâneur): characteristics. Seeing and imagining: the Poet as the only way to combine reality and imagination. The memory of the epic: "a book", "an epic", "majestic lines": is an epic poet and poem still possible in the end of the 19th Century? The past as glorious; the possibility of a great future ("the auburn race"); the present as melancholy and nostalgic: "The Hollow Men", by T. S. Eliot.

The "evil" (Baudelaire) in the city: ennumeration, fragments, "images that flicker" (Camilo Pessanha).

Eça de Queirós: The Idiosyncrasies of a Young Blonde Woman

13 Outubro 2016, 10:00 • Helena Carvalhão Buescu

The author and his time (historical, political, social and aesthetic contextualization).

Movie screening and discussion of Manoel de Oliveira's adaptation (2009) of the homonymous short story. 

The importance of narrative strategies (an opaque narration without a deep psychological analysis), the following or breaking with literary conventions (Romanticism VS Realism), the critique of Portuguese society (money and appearances, the rising bourgeoisie) and the structure of the plot (paralelism with the Greek tragedy).

Luís de Camões: The Lusiads

11 Outubro 2016, 10:00 • Helena Carvalhão Buescu

The structure of an Epic Poem: Proposition, Invocation, Dedication and Narration (in medias res). 
The Lusiads as a complex example of Epic Poetry: about joy, glory and fame as much as about disenchantment and criticism; about singing the heroes as much as about self-reflexivity (valuing the role of the poet as guarantor of immortality)
Contrapuntal reading and discussion of excerpts from Canto I, Canto IV, Canto V and Canto X. 
Intertextual relationship with The Indian Play.