Camilo Pessanha: Selected Poetry

24 Outubro 2017, 10:00 • Helena Carvalhão Buescu

Camilo Pessanha's life and work, from Symbolism to early Modernism. 

Reading and discussion of "Images that flicker across the retinas", "Who soiled these linens, who left them stained and torn", "Madrigal" 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 and fluidity; decadence and the end of an era; the passive observer; the senses as a source of knowledge (above rationality).

Cesário Verde: The Sentiment of a Westerner

19 Outubro 2017, 10:00 • Helena Carvalhão Buescu

The structure of the poem, in terms of 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 or an epic poem still possible by the end of the 19th Century? The past as glorious; the present as melancholy and nostalgia. The ill Poet and the capitalist City. 

Eça de Queirós: The Idiosyncrasies of a Young Blonde Woman

17 Outubro 2017, 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 connection with Portugal's colonial past in regards to the slave trade (from African colonies, namely from Cape Verde).

Luís de Camões: Selected Poetry (cont.) and The Lusiads

12 Outubro 2017, 10:00 • Helena Carvalhão Buescu

Reading and discussion of "With the pitcher on her head" and "That lovely slave": Camões's literary work as a combined result of learned culture and lived experience.

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.

Delivery of the first Response Paper.

Luís de Camões: Selected Poetry

10 Outubro 2017, 10:00 • Helena Carvalhão Buescu

Luís de Camões as a writer of both epic and lyric poetry, between the medieval style and the Renaissance.

Camões's lyric poems aligned with two different traditions: the popular and peninsular, through songs with motto, and the erudite and italian, through sonnets and odes. 

Reading and discussion of "The state I'm in is so unsteady"; "My errors, cruel fortune and ardent love"; "Oh let that sad and joyful dawn" and "The sky, the earth, the wind blowing softly...".