Thesis Working Title

Pluri-vocality and Alterity: Perceptions of Temporal Disjunction in Contemporary Portuguese Cinema and Literature

Bio

I am a current PhD student in English and Contemporary Literary Studies at the University of Warwick, under the supervision of Professor Paulo de Medeiros (University of Warwick) and Professor Golgona Anghel (NOVA University of Lisbon). I am a member of the Institute for the Study of Literature and Tradition (IELT) in Nova University of Lisbon.

Research Project

In 2011, the Portuguese poet and literary critic Manuel Gusmão, whose writings have had a decisive influence on the Portuguese literary paradigm, put forward this hypothesis: literature is history. The word history is polysemic: sometimes it means human action in time, sometimes it means the discourse we produce, the things we tell about this action. Literature is on an intermediate level, which Gusmão seeks to defend by rejecting an irreconcilable separation between the historical object and the subject that historicises (re-perspectiving Jameson), but recognising (against Gadamer) the non-discursive nature of living history, which can only be partially appropriated by language. Literature would thus be something that is always simultaneously excessive and unfinished, whose im-perfection allows for the constant opening of the text, situated, however, within a framework of social and ideological power relations.

This project focuses on works produced between 1998 and 2019. In the aftermath of the revolutionary period and the subsequent consolidation of a parliamentary republic, the second half of the 1990s in Portugal was marked by a difficult redefinition of the country's semi-peripheral place in the context of the global capitalist system (Boaventura Sousa Santos) and the proliferation of a revisionist perspective on the fascist regime and the revolution that contradicted the collective memory of popular participation and community structuring of political power during the revolutionary period.

In this context, my project seeks to problematise the processes of plurivocalisation (multiplication of discourse) and alterisation (transfiguration of the human, and conceptualisation of the other) that mark several works from this period, relating them to the temporal disjunction that marks the Portuguese social context. Pursuing an interdisciplinary literary investigation, we will focus primarily on the film Os Mutantes by Teresa Villaverde, the opera libretto Os Dias Levantados by Manuel Gusmão and the novel Ventos Borrascosos by Fernando Guerreiro.

Publications

Jan 2023 "O Erro está no Coração do Acerto: a construção de um método enigmático de investigação entre a poesia herbertiana e a optografia". Vértice 204 (2023): 119-134.

Sep 2022 "A matéria do tempo poético: memória e resistência na poesia de Alberto Pimenta". Entrelaces 12 2 (2022): 29-39. http://www.periodicos.ufc.br/entrelaces/article/view/81726

July 2022 "Poesia: escavações do fantasma. A tensão entre poesia e prosa em 'Teoria do Fantasma', de Fernando Guerreiro". eLyra 19 (2022): 55-65. https://elyra.org/index.php/elyra/article/view/435

Conference Papers

Jul 2023 "Virologic Mass Writing: the representation of a future language in eXistenZ". Paper presented in XIII Lisbon Summer School for the Study of Culture, Lisboa, 2023

May 2023 "Mutatis mutandis: figurations of the mutant as a response to crisis", SMLC Symposium: Rethinking the Crisis across Languages and Cultures, University of Warwick

Mar 2023 “Cinepoesis: uma poética da alucinação em Ventos Borrascosos", O Estado das Coisas III: Movimentos incertos do presente, Nova University of LIsbon

Sep 2022 “Poesia e militância em A Foz em Delta de Manuel Gusmão”, Symposium Diz-me devagar coisa nenhuma, Nova University of Lisbon

Mar 2022 "Como Rematerializar: leitura de «Teatro Dubrowka», de Fernando Guerreiro", O Estado das Coisas II: movimentos incertos do presente, Nova University of Lisbon

Fev 2021 "Há Sempre um Crime: o resto na poesia de Herberto Helder, Ana Luísa Amaral, Alberto Pimenta e Fernando Guerreiro", O Estado das Coisas: movimentos incertos do presente, Nova University of Lisbon