The ethos of Dissent in Camões' lyric poetry

• Grant number: 17/11260-4
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Post-Doctoral
• Start date: September 01, 2017
• End date: October 31, 2020
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Literature - Other Vernacular Literatures
• Principal Investigator: Antonio Alcir Bernardez Pecora
• Grantee: Matheus Barbosa Morais de Brito
• Host Institution: Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem (IEL). Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Campinas , SP, Brazil

Abstract

The aim of our project is to examine Camões' lyric poetry. Our main question concerns the constitution of the poetic persona in accordance with the rhetorical precepts of the period usually regarded as "Renaissance," highlighting what we will call an ethos of Dissent. We intend to give a more precise account of the variety of its forms, and how they structure the whole (or the reception) of Camões' work. Two hypotheses are thus put forward: 1) the constitution of an ethos of Dissent is a specific answer to an "ethical-rhetoric" space, shared by Camões and his contemporaries; 2) Camões' poetry has an aporetic character, insofar as its expectations seem to be in conflict with the very coordinates of that space. As this convention has been gradually reformulated in "literary history," spreading from the sixteenth-century rhetorical dissimulatio to romantic or post-romantic confessional poetry, understanding it allows us to grasp how Camões' work related to those poetics and common doctrines, while also performing the necessary critique of historiographical macrocategories, whether stage-related or period-driven ("petrarchism", "classicism", "mannerism", etc.), whether concerning the subsequent emergence of a "literary system." Our research combines results and directions brought by our previous Phd investigation with the study of rhetoric, in a historical reconstruction. Our preliminary bibliography is mainly focused on most recent approaches to 16th Century poetics and history and to Camões' work. In this way, we propose a series of enquiries whose aims are not only to contribute with new reading hypotheses for Camões poetry and to a better grasp of "Renaissance's" diversity of poetics, but also to provide an overview of the state of art in Camonian studies.