Mythotextuality and the evolution of ideologies the reuse of the Epic of Gilgamesh in North American texts

When the scribes of ancient Mesopotamia rewrote the Epic of Gilgamesh over a period of over two thousand years, the modifications made reflected the social transformations occurring during the same era. The dethroning of the goddess Inanna-Ishtar and the devaluation of other female characters in the evolving Epic of Gilgamesh coincided with the declining status of women in society. Since the 1960s, translations into modern languages have been readily available. The Mesopotamian myth has been reused in a wide variety of mythic and mythological texts by Quebecois, Canadian and American authors. Our analysis of the first group of mythic texts, written in the 1960s and 1970s, shows a reversal of the tendency of the Mesopotamian texts. Written at a time when the feminist movement was transforming North American society, these retellings feature a goddess with her high status restored and her ancient attributes re-established. Another group of writers, publishing in the 1980s and 1990s, makes a radical shift away from these feminist tendencies while still basically rewriting the Epic. In this group of mythic texts, the goddess and other female characters find their roles reduced while the male gods and characters have expanded and glorified roles. The third group of texts analysed does not rewrite the Epic. The Epic is reused here intertextually to give depth to mythological works set in the twentieth century or later. The dialogue created between the contemporary text and the Epic emphasises the role that the individual has in society. A large-scale comparative mythotextual study of texts that share a common hypotext can, especially when socio-historical factors are considered, provide a window onto the relationship between text and society. A comparative study of how the Epic of Gilgamesh is rewritten and referred to intertextually through time can help us relativize the understanding of our own time and culture.

Les pronoms relatifs: variation historique? Usage des pronoms relatifs en français à l’époque de la Nouvelle-France

Ce travail consiste à décrire l’usage des pronoms relatifs dans le français de trois scripteurs de l’époque de la Nouvelle-France afin de vérifier si la variation existante en français moderne y était également présente. Pour ce faire, une description de la norme des pronoms relatifs en français moderne et historique a été élaborée, et une étude de corpus (corpus MCVF annoté syntaxiquement, Martineau et coll., 2005-2010) comprenant des textes de scripteurs français et canadiens (François Gendron, Marie-Andrée Regnard Duplessis et Marie Morin) a été réalisée. L’analyse de 2521 occurrences a révélé que la variation présente en français moderne existait déjà à l’époque et y était même un peu plus importante, que l’usage des scripteurs est conforme aux attestations et descriptions présentes dans les documents historiques et de l’époque, et que les systèmes moderne et historique (XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles) des pronoms relatifs sont similaires.

A presença árabe-islâmica em Fernando Pessoa

Tese de doutoramento, Filosofia (Filosofia em Portugal), Universidade de Lisboa, Faculdade de Letras, 2015

Fairness in assessing group projects: a conceptual framework for higher education

Group projects form a large and possibly growing component of the work undertaken for assessing students in higher education, and especially in post-graduate work in business. Yet the assessments sources, methods and purposes result in an array of combinations that the literature fails to capture in its full complexity. Tutors may be able to assess the work of the group as well as they might the work of any individual. But grades - and degrees - are awarded to individuals. Writers on higher education speak of using self- and peer-assessment as a way of qualifying the evaluation of group work so as to differentiate between individuals. But these commonly used terms - drawn from approaches to assessing individual work - are ambiguous or even misleading in the context of group work. This paper proposes a framework for discussing the assessment of group projects in an effort to help identify how the benefits of group learning and be translated into fairer summative assessments.

Global sport in the suburbs: the Regent Street Polytechnic’s sports facilities at Chiswick, 1888–1938

This article shows how the elite origins and religious mission of the Regent Street Polytechnic encouraged participation in amateur sport in London, and promoted the suburb of Chiswick as a global context for competitive sports. From the 1880s to the outbreak of World War 2, the Polytechnic and its facilities forged synergies between the city centre and the burgeoning suburbs in London, engendering a city-wide culture of amateur sports, and embedding the Polytechnic into a global network of athletes. Suburbs are typically presented by writers as being ‘on the edge’ of metropolitan life, but such perspectives are wrong. The West London suburb of Chiswick was the home of Polytechnic facilities that provided a dynamic context for the internationalization and modernization of sport in the capital.

Modernism and Magic: Experiments with Spiritualism, Philosophy and the Occult, paperback

The book explores the aesthetic and political implications of the relationship between magic and mimesis in the work of those early twentieth-century writers, artists and filmmakers who were most self-consciously experimental, including James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Dziga Vertov and Sergei Eisenstein.

'The Rich Harmonics of Past Time': Memory and Montage

This article examines John Sommerfield’s 1936 novel, May Day, a work that experiments with multiple perspectives, voices and modes. The article examines the formal experiments of the novel in order to bring into focus contemporary debates around the aesthetics of socialist realism, the politics of Popular Front anti-fascism and the relationship between writers on the left and the legacies of literary modernism. The article suggests that while leftist writers’ appropriations of modernist techniques have been noted by critics, there has been a tendency to assume that such approaches were in contravention of the aesthetics of socialist realism. Socialist realism is shown to be more a fluid and disputed concept than such readings suppose, and Sommerfield’s adaptations of modernist textual strategies are interpreted as key components of a political aesthetic directed towards the problems of alienation and social fragmentation.

Representations of Portugal in Herman Hesse

The aim of my research is to answer the question: How is Portugal seen by non-Portuguese fictionists? The main reason why I chose this research line is the following: Portuguese essayists like Eduardo Lourenço and José Gil (2005) focus their attention on the image or representation of Portugal as conceived by the Portuguese; indeed there is a tendency in Portuguese cultural studies (and, to a certain extent, also in Portuguese philosophical studies) to focus on studying the so-called ‗portugalidade‘ (portugueseness), i.e., the essence of being Portuguese. In my view, the problem with the studies I have been referring to is that everything is self-referential, and if ‗portugueseness‘ is an issue, then it might be useful, when dealing with it, to separate subject from object of observation. That is the reason why we, in the CEI (Centro de Estudos Interculturais), decided to start this research line, which is an inversion in the current tendency of the studies about ‗portugueseness‘: instead of studying the image or representation of Portugal by the Portuguese, my task is to study the image or representation of Portugal by the non-Portuguese, in this case, in non-Portuguese fiction. For the present paper I selected three writers of the 20th century: the German Hermann Hesse and the North-Americans Philip Roth and Paul Auster

Caminha sílaba a sílaba

Eugénio de Andrade (1923-2005) é um dos mais celebrados e traduzidos poetas portugueses contemporâneos, com mais de trinta volumes de poesia, e vários prémios nacionais e internacionais. Como poeta atento e turista curioso, Andrade viajou com frequência para Espanha, França, Itália e Grécia, ao encontro de outros escritores (Vicente Aleixandre, Dámaso Alonso, etc.), e visitou diversas cidades e locais históricos. Recorrentemente, menciona Madrid, Valverde del Fresno, Roma, Delfos, Tebas, Súnion, Veneza, Brindisi, Corfu, etc. Em resultado destas viagens, existem, na sua poesia, poemas em prosa e crónicas, abundantes referências aos países, cultura e paisagem natural do Mediterrâneo. Eugénio de Andrade captura poeticamente o ―genius loci‖, realçando os laços entre os povos, a fauna, a flora e o clima. Desde os primeiros escritos até ao seu último livro, o poeta coerentemente apresenta uma ―visão mediterrânica‖. Recorrendo às suas obras e a excertos de algumas das entrevistas que concedeu, este artigo exemplifica, analisa e avalia estes aspectos, explorando uma faceta menos conhecida da obra eugeniana.

Voices in search of a reader: the polyphonic writing of António Lobo Antunes

This paper aims at analysing the writing of the Portuguese author António Lobo Antunes, considered one of the major writers in European Literature with 26 books published, by focusing on the strategies deployed in his texts of creating micro-narratives within the main frame, and conveying the elements of individual and collective memory, past and present, the self and the others, using various voices and silences. Lobo Antunes incorporates in his writing his background as a psychiatrist at a Mental Hospital in Lisbon, until 1985 (when he decided to commit exclusively to writing), his experience as a doctor in the Portuguese Colonial War battlefield, but also the daily routines of the pre and post 25th of April 1974 (Portuguese Revolution) with subtle and ironic details of the life of the middle and upper class of Lisbon‘s society: from the traumas of the war to the simple story of the janitor, or the couple who struggles to keep their marriage functional, everything serves as material to develop and interweave a complex plot, that a lot of readers find too enwrapped and difficult to follow through. Some excerpts taken from his first three novels and books of Chronicles and his later novel – Ontem não te Vi em Babilónia (2006) – will be put forward to exemplify the complexity of the writing and the main difficulties of the reader, lost in a multitude of narrators‘ voices. Recently, Lobo Antunes has commented on his work stating: What I write can be read in the darkness. This paper aims at throwing some light by unfolding some of the strategies employed to defy new borders in the process of reading.

O terrível nascimento da beleza: a criação literária em diversos autores

De onde brota a inspiração para baladas de amor e canções de guerra, lendas e narrativas, tragédias e comédias? Ao longo de séculos, escritores e leitores interrogaram-se acerca do nascimento da beleza. Neste artigo, abordo essa questão intrigante, em quatro etapas: a) Examino algumas personificações criadas por Hesíodo, Homero, Luís de Camões e Federico García Lorca para descreverem a inspiração; b) Exploro as estratégias utilizadas por Samuel Coleridge, Salvador Dalí e William Burroughs, para penetrar no reino da fantasia, o inconsciente; c) Apresento as explicações científicas propostas por Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung e Robert Sperry para o impulso criativo; d) Para concluir, menciono as razões que levaram Fernando Pessoa, Eugénio de Andrade e Emily Dickinson a desconfiarem da musa inspiradora, preferindo o esforço que corrige a emoção e gera a obra de arte. Seguindo uma perspectiva comparada, o meu objectivo é mostrar diferentes formas de perceber a criatividade literária. Para tanto, recorro ao trabalho dos escritores e cientistas atrás mencionados e, naturalmente, à minha opinião.

Estratégias para o desenvolvimento da competência escrita

Relatório de Estágio apresentado à Escola Superior de Educação de Lisboa para obtenção de grau de mestre em Ensino do 1.º e 2.º Ciclo

Como escrever um filme de Ficção Científica, das teorias da narrativa ao género

Trabalho de projeto apresentado à Escola Superior de Comunicação Social como parte dos requisitos para obtenção de grau de mestre em Audiovisual e Multimédia.

Niedokladna mapa teatralna portugallii

ABSTRACT - This text is divided in two parts. Firstly, I deal with the evolution on Portuguese theatre from the post-second world war period until present day. I’m focusing on the experimentalism of the forties, characterized by an urge for renewal and modernization; the constitution of a highly politicized independent theatre movement, in the seventies; and the plurality of contemporary Portuguese theatre. Secondly, I deal with the alleged inability of Portuguese writers for playwriting, signalling the most significant names of the post Carnation Revolution, on the 25th of April 1974, to present days.

As relações públicas de celebridades: o contributo das relações públicas para a gestão da reputação das celebridades em Portugal

Relatório de estágio apresentado à Escola Superior de Comunicação Social como parte dos requisitos para obtenção de grau de mestre em Gestão Estratégica das Relações Públicas.