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 …

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 …