Fernando Pessoa and the German romanticism

• Grant number: 13/05665-0
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Post-Doctoral
• Effective date (Start): November 01, 2013
• Effective date (End): October 31, 2017
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Philosophy
• Principal Investigator: Márcio Suzuki
• Grantee: Cláudia Franco Souza
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil
• Associated scholarship(s): 15/16698-2 - The project of the book of Disquiet and the German romanticism: the problem of the fragment, BE.EP.PD

Abstract

This postdoctoral research proposal intends to emphasize and characterize the relation between the prose of Fernando Pessoa and the philosophy of the first Romantics: F. Schlegel and Novalis. The fact that Fernando Pessoa was a reader of the Romanticism, namely Novalis, as we can see in Pessoa's Private Library enables the connection between the Portuguese author and the first Romanticism. In the Pessoa Archive, which contains more than twenty-seven thousand documents left by the Portuguese author, one finds the project for the Book of Disquiet. This project, which has been published in several languages and in several ways, works as a sort of puzzle, since its construction is the result of a selection of fragments. This postdoctoral research proposal intends to establish the relation between the fragments of the Book of Disquiet, considering the structure and content of this work, and the German Romanticism. The fragment is the romantic gender par excellence and, besides, F. Schlegel and Novalis discuss this subject through the analysis of the dialects between totality and fragment. The fragment is an organic potency that opens itself to the infinite, because what is involved in this notion is not the completion of a text, of a book, but the infinite forms of organization enabled by the fragmentary organics.Until the last days of his life, Pessoa created and elaborated his art with fragments and this can be related with the Romantic idea of philosophy conceived as a chain of texts, as a dynamic thought. In this Project we intend to establish the relation between the notion of philosophy conceived by Novalis and F. Schlegel and the literary tissue created by Pessoa. Some of the documents of the Pessoa Archive establish the connection between the Book of Disquiet and The Sailor (a Static Theater play, written by Pessoa and published in March 1915 in Orpheu). This postdoctoral research proposal intends, just as well, to analyze in detail this play, which is immersed in the atmosphere of dream and fantasy, and to establish the confrontation between this play and Schlegel's and Novalis' considerations about dream and reality. Another aspect that enables the confrontation between Pessoa's prose and the first generation of the Romantics is Pessoa's considerations, both in his writings on aesthetics and in the Book of Disquiet, about Goethe's Faust. The exaltation of Goethe's poetry and of the geniality of this German artist is present in Pessoa's writings as well as in the fragments of F. Schlegel and Novalis.We'll also use the notion of Romantic genius to analyze Pessoa's literary unfolding. Most of the researchers know Pessoa's three main heteronyms: Álvaro de Campos, Ricardo Reis and Alberto Caeiro. This research will clarify the importance of other literary personalities, such as Vicente Guedes, Bernardo Soares and Barão de Teive, literary personalities that signed several texts and played an important role in the literary laboratory contained in the Pessoa Archive. Fernando Pessoa created more than seventy literary personalities and this fact is in accordance with the notion of genius, as someone who contains an interior community inside himself, developed F. Schlegel and Novalis. (AU)