Lisbon in Literature and Culture
Prof. Frank F. Sousa, UMass Lowell
Course Description
Across the centuries Lisbon has been a source of inspiration for writers, as well as a place of conflict, passion, drama. This course will study Portuguese literary and cultural texts from the sixteenth century to the present that reflect images of Lisbon and Portuguese society.
The readings—one complete novel, chapters and passages from other novels, poems and other texts—include several themes, to wit: the Christian reconquest of Moorish (Muslim) Lisbon in the Middle Ages and opposing ideologies of national identity in Saramago’s historical novel The History of the Siege of Lisbon; Portuguese expansion and empire, the relationship to Islam, and Lisbon as global city in the 15th and 16th centuries in Camões’s The Lusiads; the decadence of Portugal and social criticism in passages and chapters from two 19th-century novels by Eça de Queirós—The Sin of Father Amaro—last chapter—and The Maias; the poet as flâneur in Cesário Verde’s poem “The Feeling of a Westerner”; the fragmentation of the self, loss of spiritual faith, and futurism in the poems and prose of the modernist Fernando Pessoa; the end of empire and the “return home” in António Lobo Antunes’s fantastical The Return of the Caravels. Students will study literary texts in dialogue with one another, particularly as Camões epic poem serves as intertext for most of the subsequent works in the course. The course will conclude with readings of poems from Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen and others, and the exploration of Lisbon in songs (by Amália Rodrigues, Deolinda, contemporary rappers and others) and film, including Antóno-Pedro Vanconcelos’s postcard to Lisbon, Cats Don’t Have Vertigo. We will discuss the city in the classroom and go out and about to explore sites that are the setting for texts under consideration. Taught in English.
Teaching and Learning Methods
Lecture and discussion; visiting lectures by Lisbon writers and scholars; student presentations on particular topics; walking tours and site visits to São Jorge Castle, Alfama, Baixa, Praça do Comércio, Bairro Alto, Belém, Sintra, etc. Field trips to the Museu da Cidade de Lisboa, Museu de Arte Antiga, Museu Nacional de Arqueologia, and Museu Gulbenkian. Class will meet in classroom three days a week, 2-hour sessions, and undertake two 2-hour on-site visits per week, for a total of 40 hours in four weeks.
Learning Outcomes:
By the end of the course, students will have attained
- a general knowledge of major novels, poems, literary nonfiction, and other cultural
production about Lisbon;
- an ability to critically analyze different styles of writing;
- a general understanding of the history of Lisbon (and Portugal);
- an understanding of the relationship between historiography, literature, and national identity;
- the ability to articulate how literature both reflects and helps shape culture, society and
history;
- a depth of understanding sufficient to explore the literary landscape of Lisbon on their own.
Required Readings
(Students will purchase The Return of the Caravels and Time Out Lisbon. All other materials will be provided by instructor.)
Antunes, António Lobo. The Return of the Caravels. Trans. Gregory Rabassa. New
York: Grove Press, 2003. (Available at Amazon.com)
Buck, Paul. Lisbon: A Cultural and Literary Companion. New York: Interlink Book, 2002.
Camões, Luís Vaz de. The Lusiads (Cantos IV, V and X). Trans. Landeg White: Oxford: Oxford
UP, 2008. (Stanzas from three Cantos)
Jack, Malcom. Lisbon: City of the Sea (A History). London: I. B. Tauris, 2007. (Selections)
Pessoa, Fernando. The Book of Disquiet. Ed. and trans. Richard Zenith. New York, NY: Penguin
Books, 2003. (Selections)
---. A Little Larger than the Entire Universe: Selected Poems. Ed. and trans. Richard Zenith.
New York: Penguin Books, 2006. (Selections)
Queirós, Eça de. The Crime of Father Amaro. Trans. Margaret Jull Costa. New York: New
Directions, 2003. (Last scene)
---. The Maias. Trans. Margaret Jull Costa. New York: New Directions, 2007. [Chapters and
passages]
Saramago, José. The History of the Siege of Lisbon. Trans. Giovanni Pontiero. New York:
Harvest Books, 1998.
Time Out Lisbon. London: Time Out Limited, 2015. (Available at Amazon.com)
Verde, Cesário. The Feeling of a Westerner. Trans. Richard Zenith. Ed. Victor K. Mendes. Pref.
Anna M. Klobucka. University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, 2011. (http://www.laabst.net/docs/cesario_verde_the_feeling_of_a_westerner_cover_and_text.pdf)
https://www.amazon.co.uk/d/cka/Lisbon-Poets-Lu%C3%ADs-Cam%C3%B5es/9899942200
http://www.poemsfromtheportuguese.org/The_Lisbon_Collection
Evaluation
15% Attendance and Active Participation
15% Reader Response Journal
25% Midterm
15% Oral Presentation in Class
30% Final Exam
Calendar (subject to change with notice)
Week 1
Introduction to the course, Reconquest of Lisbon from Muslims in 1147, Founding of the Portuguese Nation, and the Portuguese Overseas Empire
Three 2-hour seminars on “History,” Time Out Lisbon, 184-97; chapters and passages from Saramago's The History of the Siege of Lisbon (Theme: Reconquista, taking of Lisbon from the Moors); The Lusiads : Stanzas from Canto III, IV, V and X (O Velho do Restelo, empire, the colonial project, and historic, foundational relationship with the Muslim world).
Two field trips: Museum of the City of Lisbon, São Jorge Castle, Sé Catedra, Alfama, Baixa, monuments Belém/Restelo (Portuguese Site of Memory)
Week 2
The Lisbon Earthquake (1755) and Social Criticism and Sense of Decadence in 19th-Century Portuguese Culture and the Ghost of Camões
Two 2-hour Seminars and one 1-hour class on short passages from Voltaire’s Candide; chapter titled “The Lisbon Earthquake,” in Lisbon: The City of the Sea (A History); the last scene, set beneath the statue of Camões in Chiado/Bairro Alto, from Eça de Queirós' The Crime of Father Amaro, and two chapters and passages from The Maias, anti-epic, critical gaze upon 19th-century Portugal (particularly Lisbon) and the opposition city-corruption)/countryside(nature) in the chapter dedicated to Sintra.
Field trips:, Museu de Arte Antiga, Convento do Carmo Ruins and Museum, and Sintra. (Students on their own: Festas de Santo António)
Midterm and Submission of Reader Response Journal
Week 3
Alienation in the City, the Poet as Flâneur, Fragmentation of the Self
Three 2-hour Seminars on "Feeling of a Westerner," poem by the strolling, flâneur poet, Cesário Verde (1880) published on the tricentenary of Camões death; poems and prose by the Modernist Pessoa, including Álvaro de Campos (“Ode Marítima,” “Lisbon Revisited”) and Bernardo Soares (fragments from The Book of Disquiet, namely 3, 50, 70, 130, 170, 437, 481.
Oral Presentations
Two Field trips: Baixa, Cais de Sodré, Alcântara, Bairro Alto, etc.
Week 4
The End of the Portuguese Empire, Post-Carnation Revolution Lisbon, and Lusophone African Immigrants
Three seminars on António Lobo Antunes's The Return of the Caravels and the detritus of Empire and the return to the “small Lusitanian house”; poems by, among others, Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen, Ana Hatherly, Ana Luísa Amaral, and Eugénio de Andrade; songs by Amália, Madredeus, Deolinda (i.e., Fado and its variations in Portuguese culture), contemporary rappers who deal with the issue of colonialism and race, and films, including Cats Don’t Have Vertigo (2014), by António-Pedro Vasconcelos, and the now classic documentary Lisboetas/Lisboners (2004), by Sérgio Trefaut.
Field trips: Museu Calouste Gulbenkian and walk through the Lisbon of The Return of the Caravels. Visit to fado house and Lisbon clubs.
Final Exam and Submission of Reader Response Journal