Camilo Pessanha and Cruz e Sousa: faces of the French symbolism and the poetics of modernity

• Grant number: 12/23895-0
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research
• Start date: January 10, 2013
• End date: March 09, 2013
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Literature - Other Vernacular Literatures
• Principal Investigator: Annie Gisele Fernandes
• Grantee: Annie Gisele Fernandes
• Host Investigator: Annabela de Carvalho Vicente Rita
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil
• Institution abroad: Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal

Abstract

The project "Camilo Pessanha and Cruz e Sousa: faces of the French symbolism and the modernity" is a part of a larger research, untitled "The nineteenth century poetry considered in its specificity", that aims to investigate both poets and their poetries considering the aesthetics innovations and specific characters presents in their compositions if compared to other Brazilian and Portuguese poets from the same literary period. Themes like volksgeist, writing the self; construction of poetic memory, ekphrasis, construction of images and the importance that they acquire in the literary text are central in the study of their poems. These issues are investigated in order to point to the dialogue that keeps the Symbolists, the Orpheu's generation and the Modernists closer, in Brazil and in Portugal, and in order to review some prospects about Brazilian’s symbolists and modernists, mainly that one that affirm they would have been inconsistent and unrepresentative. This project also aims to examine, in Pessanha's and in Cruz e Sousa's poetries, how the power of words are largely on the strength of the images they construct and on the sound, that raise or extend the semantic load of each word and establishes tension between signifier and signified. In those poets, the self foundation and the self vanish have dimensions somewhat special because classics procedures such as ekphrasis, hypotyposis and dispositio are grounded in an formula symbolist par excellence: the senses and their importance in the intimate perception of the exterior and the relationship established among the lyric subject and the world. Both poets do this following up the Parisian symbolists and their rules to concept and creat the renewal lyrical at the end of the XIX's. (AU)