Portuguese and Brazilian Studies

The title of course is: Totalitarian ghosts and contemporary horizons between Portugal and Brazil
A: Contexts of Portuguese history and literary history.
B: Contexts of Brazilian history and literary history.
C: Ideas and concepts: rethinking portuguese and brazilian literatures.

Section A will focus on Portuguese history and literary history from the second half of the 19th century to the present day. The Portuguese nation reconstructed from a literary point of view - where Eça de Queirós and Fernando Pessoa emerge in all their disruptive novelty - will be read in the European and international context and, above all, in its Imperial dimension. From the so-called "third Portuguese empire", whith the dominant idea of modernizing the national culture, Portuguese history is that of the most long-lasting and anachronistic European colonial empire, that rises - or re-emerges - in Africa towards the end of the 19th century, and lasts for large part of the twentieth century, up to the final collapse, with the Revolution of 1974 and the subsequent decolonization. In configuring, between Realism and the late twentieth century, a dialectic between metropolis and colonies, Portuguese culture experiences alternating phases of modernization and semi-peripheral delay, in a climate of agony and rebirth, until it reaches its peculiar horizon, in a late twentieth century of strong Europeanization. Between melancholy and obsession with identity, Portuguese literature from the end of the century - of that last end of the century and millennium - questions the past and the present. In this context, strong and recognizable voices stand out such as that of the writers José Saramago and António Lobo Antunes.
Section B will deal with 20th century Brazilian literature, from a historical, cultural and critical point of view, going through the authoritarian phases (Estado Novo; ditadura militar) to the present days. The course will address the evolution of the interpretation of Brazilian identity with Gilberto Freyre and Sérgio Buarque de Hollanda. Some of the key experiences of Brazilian contemporary literature will be studied: poetical heirs of Modernism and, later, concretist poetry; the great novel of the first and second twentieth century - with Graciliano Ramos; Lígia Fagundes Telles; João Guimarães Rosa; Clarice Lispector; Jorge Amado; Hilda Hilst -, to then address some turning points of the close contemporaneity: the literatura marginal and the literatura feminina de autoria negra, with their "precursor", Carolina Maria de Jesus, and the post-dictatorship novel, with Bernardo Kucinski.

The course provides 9 credits. It is not possible to acquire only 6.

In section A


The course program is valid until September 2023. From the summer session 2022 it will be possible to present exclusively the A.A. 2021-22 program.