“Pessoa, Unamuno et al: The Geoliterary Chessboard of Revivalism, Iberianism, and Atlanticism,” by Partícia Silva, Research Fellow at the Centre for Social Studies (CES) of the University of Coimbra.

Abstract: This presentation addresses Pessoa’s engagement with revivalist movements occurring in his country and in other peripheral European contexts, namely the Iberian and the Hibernian ones, as he considered Ireland to be part of the Atlantic periphery. It scrutinizes their association with turn of the century and emergent modernist cultural nationalism – namely its attempt to regenerate the community, whether national or regional – and Pessoa's views on their protagonists, namely Pascoaes, Unamuno, and Yeats. Particular focus lies on Pessoa’s critique of those ethnic revivalisms for their circumscription, as well as of a Romanticist historiographic approach to literary history, whose “conception of linear time consigns Portuguese literature (and Spanish literature along with it) to a temporal position of pastness” (Cabo Aseguinolaza 2011). Therefore, my comparative examination will query the geo-cultural approaches deployed by Pessoa and Unamuno to counter the peripheral geoliterary position assigned to the Iberian Peninsula (Relvas 2019, 234), and its expansion through analysis of Pessoa’s concept of cosmopolitan Atlanticism in his essays and poetry.

Contact Krista Brune (kbrune@psu.edu) or Nicolás Fernández-Medina (nuf3@psu.edu) for Zoom information.

Contact Krista Brune (kbrune@psu.edu) or Nicolás Fernández-Medina (nuf3@psu.edu) for Zoom information.