Embodying Pessoa

by Klobucka, Anna M.; Sabine, Mark

• ISBN13: 9780802091987
• ISBN10: 0802091989
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2007-08-30
• Publisher: Univ of Toronto Pr

Summary

The multifaceted and labyrinthine oeuvre of the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) is distinguished by having been written and published under more than seventy different names. These were not mere pseudonyms, but what Pessoa termed 'heteronyms,' fully realized identities possessed not only of wildly divergent writing styles and opinions, but also of detailed biographies. In many cases, their independent existences extended to their publication of letters and critical readings of each other's works (and those of Pessoa 'himself').Long acclaimed in continental Europe and Latin America as a towering presence in literary modernism, Pessoa has more recently begun to receive the attention of an English-speaking public. Embodying Pessoa responds to this new growth of interest. The collection's twelve essays, preceded by a general introduction and grouped into four themed sections, apply a range of current interpretative models both to the more familiar canon of Pessoa's output, and to less familiar texts - in many cases only recently published. As a whole, this work diverges from traditional Pessoa criticism by testifying to the importance of corporeal physicality in his heteronymous experiment and to the prominence of representations of (gendered) sexuality in his work.

Author Biography

Anna Klobucka is an associate professor and chair in the Department of Portuguese at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth. Mark Sabine is Lecturer in Lusophone Studies at the University of Nottingham.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. ix
Introduction: Pessoa's Bodies	p. 3
Corporeal Investigations
To Pretend Is to Know Oneself	p. 39
Strength, Contemplation, and Disquiet: Towards a Corporeal Aesthetic of the Heteronyms	p. 52
Unburied Bodies: Abdication and Art Production in The Book of Disquiet	p. 71
Reading Pessoa Queerly
Fernando Pessoa: The Homoerotic Drama	p. 103
Fernando Pessoa, He Had His Nerve	p. 124
'Ever-repositioned mysteries': Homosexuality and Heteronymity in 'Antinous'	p. 149
(Dis)Placing Women
The Truant Muse and the Poet's Body	p. 181
Kissing All Whores: Displaced Women and the Poetics of Modernity in Alvaro de Campos	p. 201
Together at Last: Reading the Love Letters of Ophelia Queiroz and Fernando Pessoa	p. 224
Pessoa in Performance
Appearances of the Author	p. 245
Automatic Romance: Pessoa's Mediumistic Writings as Sexual Theatre	p. 258
Antonio Tabucchi in Search of Pessoa's Heteronymous Body	p. 273
Contributors	p. 293
Index	p. 297
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