Virginia Woolf: moments of being

Put before the labyrinth and proliferation of critical perspectives, studies and readings on Virginia Woolf, entangled in articulations of teleologies and epistemologies, the critic faces a question: from where should she/he start writing, on what and from which critical perspective? These were the circumstances that dictated my choice of writing on “A Sketch of the Past”, published in Moments of Being – A Collection of Autobiographical Writing, (1976, 1985) and of analysing the narrative strategies used by the author to tell herself, to construct her identity and power, giving voice and authority to herself as a discursive formation

Power, Authority, and Egotism: Emma Woodhouse’s Transformation in the Path into Maturity

Jane Austen’s novel “Emma” still inspires and challenges readers in the twenty-first century. The article engages in a critical analysis of the several maps of meaning the eponymous character draws in her circles of intimacy and of social acquaintances, underpinned by questions of identity and representation. It analyses how Emma represents herself and relates with the Other(s) from a position of power, authority, and egotism—identity traits of the narrative text, which is a metaphor of her life, a Landscape of the Self. During a long and painful path, in the fictionality of a possible world, from equivoque to equivoque, these identity traits are progressively transformed into true feelings of friendship and self-awareness. On the one hand, one finds a powerful young lady mastering the family and the social circles, and, on the other, an emotionally fragile young woman in need of orientation. Tracing her path, Emma constructs possibilities for her life, closely followed by the dutiful and loving help of a masculine character, whose enlightened vision transforms her stubborn, immature, and proud nature and is a cornerstone of her growth into maturity

The Autobiography of Margaret Oliphant

A cultural study of the autobiographical representation of a Victorian novelist, based on a critical agenda springing from studies of identity and studies of gender. The critical analysis is framed by the concept of autobiography as a landscape of the self, where the strategies of self-representation are approached both as a political act and as a simple story of a woman

Ultrapassar as fronteiras do literário: o tempo futuro das humanidades

Partindo da comummente aceite noção de crise nas Humanidades, este artigo procura abordar uma preocupação de anos na minha prática docente e de investigação: a de articular o estudo da literatura com os estudos de cultura, reconfigurando aquilo que os fundadores dos estudos culturais propuseram nos idos anos 50 do século passado, numa prática de transdisciplinaridade. O que proponho é que sejamos capazes de dar um passo em frente, de ‘virar a mesa’ como escreveu Robert J.C. Young em ‘Dialectics of Cultural Criticism’, e de construir o tempo futuro das Ciências Sociais e Humanas, ultrapassando as barreiras epistemológicas e levando a literatura para fora dos muros da academia, não deixando que cultura rime com sepultura, como Raymond Williams escrevia. Uma das formas de reconfigurar o estudo da literatura terá de passar pela transdisciplinaridade com as Ciências Sociais, numa abertura ao mundo e às práticas culturais significativas do quotidiano. Gostaria, assim de propor que consideremos a literatura, como objecto literário e estético, produto da capacidade imaginativa dos autores, da sua sensibilidade artística, e como uma forma de produção cultural e a analisemos em relação com as estruturas sociais e com as estruturas de poder, onde se esbatam as barreiras hegemonicamente impostas por epistemologias canónicas e onde se diluam as tensões entre o estético, o político e o ético

Yo Cayetana: The Woman in Her Own Words

Much has been said and written about Cayetana de Alba, “Grandee of Spain” and a woman who took an important part in some of the historical moments of her lifetime. The images the media conveyed of her – that of a frivolous woman - is, yet, contradicted by her autobiography. The aim of this paper is, therefore, to investigate Cayetana’s discursive gendered positions from an interdisciplinary standpoint: based on a lexicometric approach of the data collected, the semio-linguistic interpretation highlights the possibilities and modalities of her Self represented in images and emotions involved in the real world and in a historical conjuncture in which the present and the past are articulated. Her words enable us to understand the strategies she uses to construct her identity and her own meanings in the representation of her lived experience in the interstices of the Self and of social relations (Probyn, 1993)

Introdução /Introduction

INTRODUCTION Freeing itself from the domain and dependence on traditional cartographies of knowledge, the publication of the first volume of Studies of Literature of the Centre for the Study of Letters (CEL-UÉ), entitled Landscapes of the Self, crosses epistemological frontiers and research practices. Landscapes of the Self are understood within this context as the narrative, dramatic or lyrical forms which the authors from all centuries and nationalities used to create characters and contexts which, in one way or another, represent individuals and societies. The adoption of different critical approaches aims at giving visibility to works in the field of Literature and Culture which discuss identity, memory, power or representation, among others, in several contexts and in diverse social and cultural periods, ranging from the public to the private realm, and to the several spaces and places of intimacy or exteriority and otherness, giving voice to the multiplicity and heterogeneity of the research work developed in CEL-UÉ. In the diversity of the Landscapes of the Self, to which the articles bear witness, two themes are the cornerstones of the volume: the exterior and the interior landscapes. The city, in its varied figurations is, par excellence, the physical landscape, if not the favourite, the one that has most inspired the artists, especially since the nineteenth-century. Fernando Gomes, analysing some authors throughout the centuries, recalls the origins of the myth of the perverse city in opposition to the city of perfection, highlighting the literary functions of that confrontation, as well as the ambivalence of man before his Creation. London, namely the ways the city is represented as a location of Power in private, social and political contexts in the two volumes of the political autobiography of Margaret Thatcher The Path to Power and The Downing Street Years, is the theme of the article co-authored by Ana Clara Birrento and Olga Gonçalves. In a methodological collaboration between critical agendas of cultural studies and discourse analysis, the article maps the city in its intersection between an axis of subjectivity and the logic of State Power. Moving South, to the Mediterranean landscapes, Odete Jubilado develops a comparative analysis around the short narratives Lettres de mon Moulin by Alphonse Daudet and Gente Singular by Manuel Teixeira Gomes, stressing the way these authors share their memories of Provence and the Algarve. The Island of Malta is in O Mistério da Estrada de Sintra, the scenery of a story of love and crime. Ana Luísa Vilela argues that through this narrative, Eça de Queirós contributed to the formation of an image of Malta, similar to the romantic woman, disturbing, seductress and unpredictable. The African landscapes are Centro de Estudos em Letras (CEL-UÉ) 12 the scenery of Onitsha by Le Clézio and Um rio chamado tempo e uma casa chamada terra by Mia Couto. Celina Martins writes about the way these narratives stage the initiation journeys of the protagonists into an Africa conceived as a space of transcendence, initiation and openness to the Other. The interior landscapes influenced, positively or negatively, by the environment that surrounds us, are a never-ending source of literary creation. On the one hand, the satirical tradition started by Horatio – production of his satire while he walks in the city – is the inspiration of the enunciator of the poems by Nicolau Tolentino. Carlos Nogueira shows that through an unstable laughter, the Tolentinian I-poet-character deconstructs the moral and behavioural models of the whole society of his time. On the other hand, Antero de Quental’s poetry reveals a closed and dialectal play of images and thoughts. Emphasizing the negativity and its most representative images, António Cândido Franco tries to show that the poetry of Quental is expression and landscape of a complex of metaphysics, able though to be solved by a superior unity of all the contraries. Crete is the geographical place, but also an intimate landscape, a mythic and literary place explored by Jorge de Sena in his poem “Em Creta, com o Minotauro”. Elisa Nunes Esteves re-reads this text, considered a hymn to Crete, pointing out the themes of identity, of the relation with motherland and exile idealized by the lyrical I. “To be or not to be Ophelia” that is the question put by Carla Ferreira de Castro, who reads Shakespeare’s verses through several lenses from other different artistic moments. Her article shows a double perspective of landscape, the geographical – the stream Ophelia chooses as her shroud -, and the psychological which corresponds to the essence of the young orphan girl unable to coexist with the successive losses she experiences. The representation of the Self and the Other in the literature of the nineteenth-century is the theme presented by Ana Cláudia Salgueiro da Silva, who analyses two novels, Uma Família Inglesa by Júlio Dinis and O Primo Basílio by Eça de Queirós, authors who through plural visions offer a distinct vision of the real with a pedagogic aim, namely the consolidation of core social structures like marriage. The intricacies of feeling and of interiority, and the way the confrontation with society determines the wanderings along the diegesis by the protagonists of Eurico, o presbítero and Ivanhoe are the object of the comparative reading of Teresa Mendes, who tries to understand the narrative and textual mechanisms found by Alexandre Herculano and Sir Walter Scott to construct their characters. This first volume of Studies of Literature of the Centre for the Study of Letters (CEL-UÉ), entitled Landscapes of the Self, is a collection of articles which postulate critical thought on diverse discursive modes – narrative, dramatic and lyrical texts – which, due to their multiplicity, bear witness to the vigour and contemporaneity of the literary representation of the world of the individuals. The volume was only possible due to the inestimable collaboration of the Scientific Committee, composed of : Estudos de Literatura: Paisagens do Ser / Landscapes of the Self 13 Ana Isabel Moniz (Universidade da Madeira) Antonio Sáez Delgado (Universidade de Évora) Cristina Robalo Cordeiro (Universidade de Coimbra) Elisabeth Jay (Oxford Brookes University) Helena Buescu (Universidade de Lisboa) Jeanyves Guérin (Université Sorbonne-nouvelle – Paris III) José Pedro Serra (Universidade de Lisboa) Mário Avelar (Universidade Aberta) Fernando Gomes Ana Clara Birrento Odete Jubilado Elisa Nunes EstevesCEL-UÉ (Centro de Estudos em Letras - Unidade de Gestão - UÉ

The Dimension of Human Possibilities in Silas Marner

The article envisages a thought-provoking direction for the future, juxtaposing but not blending the theory of possible worlds and the concept of space applied to literature. It brings new methodologies to the forefront of current research, reading “Silas Marner” (1861) by George Eliot as a landscape of the Self, a construction of a possible world for an old-fashioned way of life. The theory of possible worlds was originally introduced in philosophical logic and has gradually gained interdisciplinary ground, namely in literary and cultural studies; hence the article analyses “Silas Marner” in the light of this theory, discussing the places where the novel develops like dimensions of human possibilities of ways of life and like metaphors of dynamic generation of story worlds and of emotion. Looking into the construction of cultural landscapes and contexts of experience, the article discusses how identity and the way Silas interacts with others provide meaning and develop a sense of belonging. Underpinned by the notions of place and space that inform people’s identity and develop bonds, the critical analysis reaches the conclusion that in the plurality of distinct worlds and in the relation to physical environment, one finds in the novel dimensions of the individual through patterns of belief, preferences, feelings, values and aspirations

Os equívocos de Emma Woodhouse: o caminho para a maturidade

Contando a história da jovem de boas famílias, com uma consciência de classe bem vincada, que sofre com a ideia inflacionada que tem das as suas capacidades, o romance traça as desventuras da protagonista na sociedade, à medida que se entrega à tarefa apaixonante, no seu ponto de vista, de casar pessoas, enquanto procura uma companhia, dado que a sua preceptora casou.A teimosia e a vaidade de Emma estão na origem de muitos dos conflitos e equívocos ao longo do romance, à medida que a jovem vai lutando para se desenvolver emocionalmente e atingir, assim, a maturidade

Tell what moves you, and I will tell you who you are

O título mais ou menos enigmático desta intervenção é uma adaptação de uma frase de John Ruskin, poeta e crítico social britânico da segunda metade do século XIX e tem como principal objetivo dar início a uma breve reflexão sobre o que é investigar, ou melhor dito, o que pode ser investigar em Literatura no mundo atual, do meu ponto de vista. A investigação teve, tem e continuará a ter uma relevância extraordinária, a investigação na área das Humanidades, nomeadamente da Literatura teve, tem e terá o seu lugar, porque as Humanidades ainda importam e a Literatura ainda importa. A Literatura ajuda-nos a pensar melhor e aguça a nossa visão crítica do mundo. Ajudar alguém a iniciar um projeto de investigação passará por entender qual o ponto de partida, que autores, que temas, que problemáticas o/a movem, pois, estas questões são, necessariamente, decorrentes da identidade de cada um e definem-nos enquanto pessoas

About Raymond Williams

Williams brought together what modern thought has separated in the relation between culture and society. His use of literary texts to exemplify the concept of knowable community as well as the concept of structure of feeling is one of his achievements. To read novels as knowable communities comprises a project of cultural construction based on the refusal to consider the separation between culture and society; it is not to hesitate between tenses and to give a future to the imagination of the authors and of the readers