A sua pesquisa

No presente trabalho, pretende-se realizar uma investigação acerca das relações entre melancolia, enunciação e literatura, especificamente, em três grandes nomes da poesia contemporânea em língua portuguesa: Noémia de Sousa (Moçambique), Florbela Espanca (Portugal) e Ana Cristina Cesar (Brasil). Para tanto, foram selecionados textos em que se verifica a recorrência da dicção melancólica como traço constituinte da lírica de cada uma das poetisas. Pretende-se, com tal análise, verificar que a constituição de uma poética da melancolia nessas autoras, resguardados os devidos panoramas histórico-culturais, instaura-se no limiar entre os questionamentos existenciais do indivíduo e a crítica aos modelos institucionais e às questões políticas e sociais vigentes, estabelecendo um processo que reverbera uma melancolia coletiva na voz do eu-lírico.

La poesía está desnuda, siempre lo estuvo, a pesar de su corte de aduladores que nos dicen que solo se engalana con los más absurdos ropajes de su conveniencia. La extensa red de silencios, complicidades y favores que recubren su visibilidad, convertida en producto cultural de las élites, ha hecho imposible la evidencia: la poesía está desnuda y su historia tiene más que ver con la exclusión y el sectarismo, que con el rigor crítico e histórico. Mientras siga en manos de las élites intelectuales, ellas mismas producto de un nepotismo y un clientelismo servil y endogámico, mientras siga disuelta entre los mitos que esa misma élite intelectual sostiene, y mientras siga presa de una investigación crítica perezosa, enrocada en el precedente, la cita y la reproducción de las tesis de los facultados para favorecer la promoción discipular y académica, nunca sabremos qué es lo que ha pasado en nuestras letras. La historia quedará escrita como hasta ahora en función de mandarinatos, redes clientelares muy disciplinadas que tejen auténticas tramas de control e influencia institucional, políticas editoriales y operaciones de promoción de determinados relatos en consonancia con el discurso dominante y, de paso, silencian o barren toda disidencia, toda oposición. Sobre esta contradicción fundamental, la desnudez de la poesía y el exceso de vestuario producido por los que han querido agostarla a su gusto, se ha construido la historia de la poesía española contemporánea. Juicios que defienden los intereses de la familia o la tendencia, constituyendo una especie de egoísmo gregario que sólo protege sus intereses de grupo; unido, paradójicamente, a un fuerte individualismo y egocentrismo a la hora de juzgar la realidad no como lo que es, sino como a uno le parece que es, en tanto guerra por el significado y el control de la palabra, de cara a establecer un discurso totalitario y hegemónico, y la ignorancia de la ideología como un serio obstáculo para interpretar la realidad en la medida que la ideología construye lo real. Sobre estos pilares se construye hoy la poesía española y se impide el conocimiento liberador, pero los mitos y los ídolos no son obstáculos insalvables, más si, a cambio, lo que proponemos es una solución reactiva a unas prácticas amorales y prepotentes.

El escenario poético español de los últimos treinta años ha reformulado el compromiso desde distintos ángulos estéticos e, incluso, como una opción inicial que marque toda una producción textual, ajena a la urgencia y la exigencia histórica. Este pequeño giro con respecto a la concepción primitiva del compromiso poético español y el engagement sartreano rompe, sin lugar a dudas, las barreras de la provisionalidad estética en aras de una responsabilidad ética-moral que ya no es opcional, sino que se incorpora como un derecho y un deber del contrato social-poético.

Abstract: In the world of Mexican poetry of the 20th and 21st centuries an intense melancholy can be seen. Poets such as Ramon López Velarde, Xavier Villaurrutia, Efraín Huerta, Jaime Labastida, Francisco Hernández or Marco Antonio Campos, among others, may be clearly set into this poetic mode. Each one of these authors has dealt with one or several of the many expressions related to melancholy, from tedium to erotic impulse, patriotic passion or more often, anguish provoked by illness, suicide and death. Given my belief that Jaime Sabines’work springs from melancholic humor, particularly from some of its symptoms described in philosophy, sociology or anthropology, and since this may explain his retreat from writing quite a few years before his death, this article approaches Sabines´ poetry taking into account some of the most relevant and well-known studies on melancholy (Agamben, Bartra, Paz, Castro Santiago or Arancibia). Resumen: En el mapa de la poesía mexicana de los siglos XX y XXI se aprecia una intensa presencia del carácter melancólico. En esta línea podrían ubicarse Ramón López Velarde, Xavier Villaurrutia, Efraín Huerta, Jaime Labastida, Francisco Hernández o Marco Antonio Campos, entre otros. Cada uno de estos autores ha poetizado algunas de las múltiples caras de la tristeza, desde el tedio y el abatimiento hasta la exacerbación erótica, la pasión patriótica o, más frecuentemente, la angustia por la enfermedad, el suicidio y la muerte. Dada mi convicción de que la obra de Jaime Sabines es fruto del humor melancólico –en particular de algunas de las manifestaciones de éste descritas desde la filosofía, la sociología y la antropología– y puesto que puede explicar su casi completa renuncia a la creación poética bastantes años antes de su muerte, este trabajo lee al autor chiapaneco a la luz de algunos destacados estudios sobre la melancolía (Agamben, Bartra, Paz, Castro Santiago o Arancibia).

No mundo ocidental, são muitas as vozes que nos vão lembrando, de tempos a tempos, que já não sabemos encarar a morte com frontalidade e dignidade. Assumiu-se que falar da morte é produzir uma dor ou um mal-estar que colidem com os valores da nossa sociedade, cada vez mais voltada para o culto da beleza e da eterna juventude. Até sensivelmente às décadas de 70 ou 80 do século passado, a sociedade portuguesa, sobretudo a mais rural, não escondia dos mais novos as doenças, o envelhecimento e a morte dos entes queridos, e o cancioneiro infantil e juvenil era uma das grandes expressões e uma das fontes de todos estes temas. Hoje, estas são questões praticamente silenciadas, dir-se-ia até proibidas, e por isso muitas crianças são educadas sem o conhecimento da morte. Partindo destes pressupostos, abordaremos neste artigo a questão da morte na poesia oral e tradicional infantil portuguesa moderna e contemporânea. Veremos, em particular, se a morte aparece mais como personagem ou mais como acontecimento, refletiremos sobre os seus tipos e as suas incidências semânticas, simbólicas e pragmáticas, e discutiremos se vale a pena trazer estes textos para o contexto educativo.

Neste artigo, através de uma análise das formas e dos conteúdos de várias pelejas brasileiras, selecionadas de entre muitas centenas de folhetos de cordel, procuramos mostrar de que modo aí se apresentam e confrontam homens e mulheres; e procuramos, ainda, compreender o lugar deste género textual na (re)construção da sociedade brasileira (e não só).

In this article we try to show how the work of the Portuguese writerLiberto Cruz establishes a compromise between the poem as text freeof any ideological imposition and the poem as social and politicalaction; between the internal and personal experience of the authorand his commitment to the history of the country; between the selfsufficiency of the poem and its links to the larger world; betweencommunication and elevation; between the work’s expansion ofimage and semantics and the communication of feelings, emotionsand ideas; and between the textual “I” and the biographical “I”.

A poesia oral não pode ser compreendida fora da estrutura social em que vive, nem o funcionamento da comunidade pode ser integralmente apreendido sem um conhecimento da sua poesia de transmissão oral. Por isso, neste estudo, influenciado pelo pensamento de José de Almeida Pavão Júnior e Paul Zumthor, procuramos demonstrar que uma abordagem séria da poesia oral não pode fixar-se unicamente no âmbito do literário, nem apenas nos seus aspectos culturais, antropológicos e sociológicos. A poesia oral, como as tradições em geral, só existe porque cumpre funções. Refletir sobre este aspecto é também pensar sobre o contexto social e cultural da performance literária, a idiossincrasia dos poetas-intérpretes e do grupo social, as diferentes espécies, a linguagem e o estilo, as circunstâncias da composição, da transmissão e da recepção dos textos.

The article presents the celebrated peleja (verse exchange) between Inácio da Catingueira and Romano da Mãe d'Água in the Brazilian North-East. The polemic peleja de cordel (a kind of chapbook), which evokes a poetic contest that allegedly took place in 1874 or 1875 in Recife, is regarded as the first of a kind that forms one of the most important phases in Brazilian cordel literature. On the one side stands a slave poet and on the other a landowner; each aims to defend and to characterize the race and social class to which he belongs. The article aims to demonstrate the influence of scientific thinking in popular literature, particularly with regard to ethnic and cultural miscegenation.

Contemporary visual poetry remains as hybrid and experimental an artistic modality as it was in the 20th century, with a continued emphasis on mixing temporal and spatial elements in a dynamic verbal–sound–visual structure. These essential aspects and techniques, still at work today, which originated in simple pattern poems from earlier centuries, reached their peak of sophistication with the Concretists and Neoconcretists. Today, however, intermedia practices have a tendency to focus more on certain aspects of our technoculture that resonate with an ‘altered’ mode of perception, keen on exploring uncharted territories through the newest technologies and the speed of information. To illustrate this attraction to the functional use of technologies, I have selected two representative artists, Bartolome Ferrando and Eduardo Kac. Their radically different lines of work and artistic intentions reflect, nonetheless, a similar conception of poems as (bio)dynamic objects, existing as living art within a continuum of possibilities. Ferrando is more interested in exploring the possibilities of condensing movement in a 2-D or 3-D surface, whereas Kac wants his poetic performances to interfere with the essentials of life itself. These authors prioritize the importance of non-linear sequencing with the organization of multiple levels of information in micro-units of space-time in order to manipulate the standard experiences and expectations of readers.

Centred around Antonio Gramsci's concept of hegemony, this paper employs a critical globalisation theory framework to argue that the 1990s notion of ‘changing the world from below', understood as resistance to capitalist globalisation through a ‘transnational civil society', requires re-theorisation in the light of the contemporary developments in Our America. I make a methodological case for a neo-Gramscian approach to argue that ‘counter-hegemony', together with an adequate theorisation of the state and power, should be the preferred concept over the inherently apolitical and under-theorised ‘alter-globalisation'. Whilst the alter-globalisation movement's ideational and normative challenges to hegemony (captured in ex-British prime minister Thatcher's There-Is-No-Alternative-Doctrine, TINA) are undisputed, the transformation of the global geographies of power through local actors alone has remained illusory. Rather, the experience of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America - Peoples' Trade Agreement (ALBA-PTA) strongly suggests that counter-hegemonic globalisation theory will have to consider the roles of both the ‘state-in-revolution' and the ‘transnational organised society'. This will be shown through the analysis and theorisation of the ALBA-PTA as a multi dimensional inter and transnational counter-hegemonic regionalisation and globalisation project that operates across a range of sectors and scales.

Professionalization and political engagement are usually placed as incompatible in the case of journalism and the mainstream press, resulting in an identification of cultural resistance exclusively with alternative/amateur vehicles. I will use the concept of journalistic field as introduced by Pierre Bourdieu to review these assumptions and discuss a form of political resistance that acts in one's own area of knowledge, is not overtly political and whose effects are not immediately accountable for. Drawing examples from my research on two literary newspapers published in the 1950s in Brazil and Uruguay, this paper will focus on the implications of didacticism for literary criticism as a genre of newswriting. The analysis of these newspapers will lead to a reflection on two main issues: a) the conflict between the professionalization and democratization of literature; and b) the definition of resistance as necessarily an action that is against something. The article will reconsider education in journalism as a form of resistance, taking into account its risks of becoming political indoctrination and commercial manipulation, but emphasizing its potential as a way of expanding access to literature.

The poetic space, as I see it, is a space of resistance. Resistance against the media which do not need poetry. Communication among poets is a go-between, a web of messages, performances and presentations, the circulation of books and digital materials. These activities are political, functioning as politics in the Greek sense: discussion in a public arena, exchanges of opinion and criticism, interventions, concerted decisions, group projects, a net of relationships around the production of texts, articulating versions and diversions of language. These activities and exchanges give the participants a sense of fulfillment. In this sense to pass is to think, to question a certain regime, to marvel that it is still there, to wonder what makes it possible, going into its enclaves, looking for traces of the movements which formed it and discovering in those stories apparently in ashes, how to think, how to live otherwise.

In this article, I analyze the notions of sequentiality and simultaneity in Ursula K. Le Guin's science fiction novel The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia (1974). I extrapolate this analysis to the contrasting epistemic sensibilities surrounding the concepts of ‘revolution' and ‘resistance' respectively. I am particularly concerned with the role these concepts play in contemporary academic production in the humanities. My aim is to understand the implications of the different conceptions of time and representation associated with each of those two concepts, and what their actual ideological operativity is in the context of the present status quo.

This essay is a brief study of translation as a practice of aesthetic resistance seen from a historical and philosophical perspective. Translation is perceived as the process of transition and negotiation within the ‘third space' between various different hybrid cultural contexts and their discursive constraints, and referred to as ‘paratranslation'. It summarises the first attempts to think of translation as an almost ‘holistic' paradigm and the aesthetics of intervention from Romantic philosophy onwards. It attempts to show how Walter Benjamin's master narrative, the utopia of ‘pure language', encourages continuous resistance to the totalitarianism of the idea of the ‘original', to aesthetics (within the sense of the perception of the real) and to dominant discourses. It subsequently defines the idea of ‘progress', which considers translation as aesthetic resistance, as a process of construction in constant deconstruction. It concludes by exemplifying the notion of translation as a paradigm of intervention in modernity with a brief analysis of the transcreation performed by Erin Mouré on Fernando Pessoa/Alberto Caeiro's poetic cycle, O Guardador de Rebanhos (The Keeper of Sheep).

Cardboard is hardly a material we associate with new media or digital technology in general. And yet in considering a series of recent editorial projects in several Latin American cities—editorial projects whose last name is always Cartonera and whose defining attribute is a trash aesthetic of hand-painted books made from recycled cardboard—it seems difficult to avoid confronting the present media ecology characterized by these technologies. These editorials produce, on some level, a kind of ‘‘new media,’’ although the mere novelty of their enterprise is only the most superficial of their affiliations with this concept. On the contrary, it seems clear to me that these projects also enact a form of production that should be interrogated within a discussion of the forms of sociality associated with new media and the politico-economic landscape they inhabit and condition.

O obxectivo deste traballo é vincular a representación de Santiago de Compostela cos procesos de construción da identidade galega contemporánea, privilexiando as diferentes figuracións da cidade no ámbito da poesía. Además de analizar o papel da cidade en distintos poemarios, antoloxías, libros coletivos e coleccións, o artigo detense nas implicacións socioliterarias d inclusións dos textos e fragmentos poéticos en soportes como a tarxeta postal, os catálogos ou as guías de viaxe. En suma, este percorrido pola historia da literatura galega da segunda metade do século XX á luz das figuracións urbanas pretende poñer de relevo a importancia de Santiago como escenario e motor de modelos identitarios diferenciais, cando no abertamente contrapostos.

En el presente trabajo nos proponemos revisar los trasiegos de la canción “de autor” a la luz de una de sus muchas relaciones con el campo literario: la musicalización de poetas consagrados. Esta operación de “traslado”, con el correr de las décadas, ha conformado un corpus dilatado en el tiempo y en el espacio, y registra, en términos teóricos, diversas travesías: de la letra a la voz (y al cuerpo), del libro al disco (y, consecuentemente, a los medios y al escenario), de la soledad de la lectura silenciosa a la recepción grupal, etc. Nuestro interés se centrará en el análisis de estas cuestiones generales y, asimismo, en el de dos ejemplos puntuales, Joan Manuel Serrat y Amancio Prada. En el cruce de imaginarios diversos y a menudo encontrados, estos autores nos ofrecen dos “figuras de artista” enlazadas, naturalmente, con las particulares operatorias de lectura –y puesta en letra– que realizan de una/s determinada/s tradición/es y modelos de la literatura española.

The public sphere conception continues to hold center stage in debates and visions of radical democratic society, and Jürgen Habermas’ work continues to be the most popular starting point for developing this conception. However, the Habermasian public sphere has also come under powerful and sustained criticism from many quarters. Here I concentrate upon the critiques of a group of theorists to whom I refer as difference democrats. I examine the three key arguments of these critics:that the public sphere conception involves the exclusion of aesthetic-affective modes of communication and hence the voices of certain groups; that it assumes that power can be separated from public discourse, which masks exclusion and domination; and that it promotes consensus as the purpose of deliberation, which marginalizes voices that do not readily agree. Against these claims I show that the Habermasian public sphere can be read as maximizing the inclusion of difference in deliberative exchange. I demonstrate how the conception extensively accommodates aesthetic-affective modes of discourse, how it accounts for both negative and positive forms of power in discourse, and how it promotes the process over the end-point of rational discourse in public opinion formation.