L0035 - PORTUGUESE AND BRAZILIAN LITERATURE II

The course provides an introductory historical-literary and critical-textual overview of Portuguese modernisms from the late nineteenth to the twentieth century, focusing on the relationship between texts and contexts, and between aesthetic change and political-cultural transformations.
It begins with the fin de siècle crisis (Questão de Coimbra; the 1890 British Ultimatum) and the transition from realist-naturalist paradigms to new representations of modernity. In this framework, Eça de Queirós’s A cidade e as serras is studied as a “threshold text” between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, introducing imaginaries of progress, technology and disillusionment.
The central part of the course is a comparative module on Fernando Pessoa and José de Almada Negreiros, examined in dialogue and contrast. The aim is to highlight correspondences and differences in their strategies of modernity: on the one hand, heteronymy as a device of authorship and a laboratory of poetics; on the other, interventionist writing and the performative dimension of the modernist gesture (manifesto, experimental prose, public polemic). Within this perspective, the main -isms (Paulism, Intersectionism, Sensationism) are presented as operational categories for reading texts and procedures, showing how in Pessoa they function as poetic frameworks and how in Almada they are enacted as textual and cultural practices. A key moment is the cross-reading of the two Ultimatums (Álvaro de Campos / Almada Negreiros), as two distinct models of modernist intervention.
The course also foregrounds the role of journals and programme texts (especially Orpheu, with references to Portugal Futurista) as tools for network-building, aesthetic conflict and cultural legitimation. The final section links literature to the Estado Novo context (censorship, institutions, ideology) through the close reading of one novel chosen between Vergílio Ferreira’s Manhã Submersa and José Cardoso Pires’s O Delfim.