Portuguese Literature Commons^™

Figures Of Radical Absence: Blanks And Voids In Theory, Literature, And The Arts, Alexandra Irimia

Languages and Cultures Publications

Although post-structuralism highlighted the importance of what is offstage, lost, forgotten, hidden or discarded, silent or silenced, the poetics and politics of absence (much like its ethics and aesthetics) have rarely been discussed across media and disciplines. This book proposes the concept of ‘radical absence’ to describe a certain tradition of resistance to ontology, predication, and representation, contesting their reliance on a metaphysics of presence. Apophatic speech, empty signifiers, and figural voids are some of the figures through which radical absence becomes apparent with unprecedented intensity in twentieth-century theory, literature, film, and the arts. Phantasmatic and outrageous, such figures play …

Re-Reading Alencar's Iracema Through Saer's Lens, Felicia Trievel

Vernacular: New Connections in Language, Literature, & Culture

Abstract:

The topic of European colonization is one that is discussed frequently throughout Latin American literature in a variety of different manners. Two books that discuss the colonization of different countries in extremely different ways are Iracema (1865) by José de Alencar and El entenado (1983) by Juan José Saer. The former examines the colonization of Brazil by Portuguese colonists, taking away much of the culture of the indigenous people previously inhabiting Brazil. El entenado examines the colonization of Argentina by the Spaniards. When one reads these two novels it is impossible not to compare the two due to the …

Paulo Coelho: Transnational Literature, Popular Culture, And Postmodernism, Anna Pavlova Murta

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

With over 350 million books sold worldwide in more than 80 languages, Paulo Coelho is an international literary phenomenon that moves “beyond culture of origin” (Damrosch 199) and inhabits the “world literary space” (Pascale 281). Would his novels, therefore, stand as materialization of Goethe’s humanist cosmopolitan vision upon the coinage of the term world literature? Many cultural scholars would argue to the contrary. This dissertation aims at exploring Coelho narratives and their popularity and controversial reception by contextualizing them within the contemporary scholarship on World Literature and within the global cultural economy.

An underlying assumption of this Cultural Studies approach …

The Gospel According To José Saramago: A Comparative Study Of Critical Reception In Portugal, United States, And Canada, Bruna Reis

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Portuguese writer José Saramago (1922-2010) is well-known for controversial, challenging, and thought-provoking novels. In this study, I analyze the critical reception of his works in his home country, where The Gospel According to Jesus Christ (1991) was excluded from participation in the European Literary Prize on ideological grounds, and in the United States and Canada, where Blindness (1995) brought a wave of uniformly positive response until the publication of Cain (2010), perceived negatively as a didactic tool to convince readers of the unviability of Christianity.

This examination is framed by Iser’s theory of aesthetic response. More specifically, I focus on …