Poetics of Portuguese expression

Research Projects:

A history about poetry

Description: This project intends to compose  a history of poetry in the West, highlighting that the identification of the poetic text is not pre-existing to its concept.

Professor in charge: Adma Muhana Fadul (adma@usp.br)

 

Camilo Pessanha, Cruz e Sousa, readings from French symbolism and modern poetics

Description: This project, whose subject is the poetic compositions of Camilo Pessanha and Cruz e Sousa, is part of a broader research that aims to investigate works with specific characteristics of aesthetic-poetic procedures in the context of symbolists and (pre-)modernists in Brazil and Portugal, as well as possible similarities between them, especially regarding the writing/constitution of the subject, the construction of poetic memory, the volksgeist, and the importance that images acquire in literary text. The study of these issues aims to call attention to the dialogue that the Orpheu’s generations and the Brazilian modernism keep with symbolism, and also to review the ways of seeing symbolism and the Brazilian pre-modern generations, especially the one that states the last two were little consistent and representative. The objective of this project is to examine how, in Camilo Pessanha’s and Cruz e Sousa’s poetry, the power of words is mostly on the strength of the images brought up and on sounds capable of prolonging the semantic load of each word, or establishing tension between the signifier and the signified. In them, the taking care of the I and the constitution and the weakening of the I acquire particular dimensions since classics features such as the ekphrasis, the hipotiposis, or the dispositio are founded on a symbolist resource by excellence: the action of the senses and their importance in the intimate perception of the outside and in the relationship between the subject and poetic world, as they develop themselves, inspired by the Parisian style, in the rise of the transformations of the lyrical renewal.

Professor in charge: Annie Gisele Fernandes (anniefer@usp.br)

 

Fernando Pessoa: authorship and irony

Description: The dominant point of view of this research guided the reading of Pessoa’s work, associating the concept of authorship with irony. Our hypothesis is that the authorship in Pessoa is an essentially ironic formulation of the dialectic game between the subject and the object, as well as between the main opposite categories raised by the heteronym phenomenon, reality, and fiction. The objective of this research is to test its consistency as a way of understanding the poetic system employed by Pessoa and his more specific works.

Professor in charge: Caio Marcio Poletti Lui Gagliardi (caiogagliardi@usp.br)

 

Contemporary Portuguese Poetry

Description This project aims to investigate the contemporary Portuguese poets born from the 1940s onwards. It aims to analyse the modes of aesthetic creation andthe repercussions that the text, as an artistic object, reveals from the Portuguese historical-social world, particularly regarding the proximities and distances settled during Salazar’s dictatorship. The corpus chosen for this research, besides maintaining the authors linked with our previous project – particularly with poets such as Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen and Herberto Helder, whose imaginary is of a very distinctive lineage compared to its peers – includes the poet and critic Joaquim Manuel Magalhães, and also Rui Belo, Luis Quintais, and Manuel de Freitas.

Professor in charge: Paola Poma (ppoma@usp.br)

 

Fernando Pessoa and the modernism

Description Besides creating the heteronyms phenomenon, Fernando Pessoa is the central figure to consider when thinking about the Portuguese modernity and the European modernity in a comparative way not only regarding poetic language, but also the theme concerning the place where this modern subject – split up, multiple, and in danger of disappearing – is currently inserted. It is also associated with this theme the feeling of disbelief towards the world, a species of social-cultural nihilism. This projects aims to not only study these relations, but also include the existing dialogue between the poet and his companions from Revista Orpheu: Mário de Sá Carneiro and Almada Negreiros.

Professor in charge: Paola Poma (ppoma@usp.br)

 

Critical edition of the chivalric novel The Chronicle of the Emperor Clarimundo by João de Barros

Description: critical edition, along with Nanci Romero, of the chivalric novel The Chronicle of the Emperor Clarimundo, by João de Barros, to be published by Editora Ateliê in the year of 2015. 

Professor in charge: Lenia Marcia de Medeiros Mongelli (flc@usp.br)