Miguel Torga: Sesame

16 Novembro 2017, 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" (from Tales from the Mountain): 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 space (small villages' connections with tales and legends), characters (individual/collective) and symbologies (the cave). Main themes: innocence and delusion; learning processes and imagination; integration and community; reality VS fantasy; local and global; magic in everyday life VS magic in fiction.

Screening of a segment ("The Sorcerer's Apprentice") from Fantasia (1999, animation film) to discuss the concept of hybris, the connection between storytelling and magic and 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).

Oral presentations: Daria Boiko, Daria Yakusheva, Dimitra Bakagianni and Ioana Mindru.