Theses defended
Portugueses de Torna-Viagem. A Representação da Emigração na Literatura Portuguesa.
February 4, 2016
Heritages of Portuguese Influence
Margarida Calafate Ribeiro
e
Roberto Francavilla
Abstract
How is the migratory experience represented in Portuguese Literature?
This dissertation wants to offer an answer to this question through a study that might contribute to the comprehension of a Portuguese society's characteristic that is structuring and diversified: emigration, a persistent and remarkable feature in both the past and the present. The main objective is to outline a literary map that functions as a hermeneutic guide on the appearance and the characterization of this theme.
Therefore, it analyses representations of emigration since mid-XIXth century until the contemporaneity - in novels, short stories and chronicles - with the purpose of hypothesizing the relevance of the migratory experience in the Portuguese literary field. This path is guided by a constellation of concepts: the broad notion of empire and its repercussions in Portuguese culture as well as the differences that need to be clarified when using words such as emigration, diaspora or exile. The idea of migration becomes then stimulating and inclusive in the context of literary studies, being expanded to the observation of notions like: other/the stranger, uncanny, absence, rootlessness, hybridity and ambivalence.
Since the creation of the 'brasileiro torna-viagem' in the novels of Camilo Castelo Branco and Júlio Dinis, this character type continued to appear in new portraits, re-writings and counterpoints in the texts of the writers of 'Geração de 70' as well as in the end of the century writings of Fialho de Almeida and Trindade Coelho. The emigration is also reported as an experience in a contact zone through the discoursive compendium of the travel writings of Francisco Gomes de Amorim. In the beginning of the XXth century, these same writings are re-written and questioned in the novels by Ferreira de Castro.
In the XXth century it is possible to observe the persistence in the reformulation and denial of Camilo Castelo Brancos's paradigm through the short stories of Aquilino Ribeiro, Miguel Torga and Mário Braga. At the same time, other types of texts about emigration start to surface, where the difficulty of telling the experience of migration and its subsequent rootlessness is obvious. The geographical dispersions is not restricted to Brazil, also including other destinations like the USA and Europe. In the case of North American it is essential to highlight the narratives produced in Azores, with its mirages of America and the realistic and personified telling of the migratory experience. The European case is all about the appearance of a motley group of texts that testify with rawness the great wave of emigrants that went to France and Germany during the last two decades of the 'Estado Novo' dictatorship.
From the deep abyss of emigration come to us the reflections of Miguel Torga and the writings of exiled intellectuals like Jorge de Sena, José Rodrigues Miguéis and Manuel Alegre. Finally, we arrive to the literature published after the 25th of April of 1974, with the novels of Olga Gonçalves, Manuel da Silva Ramos, João de Melo and José Luís Peixoto. Distinguished by the processes of re-writing History and the memories of emigration, they represent the group of texts that I propose to identify with the current definition of migration literature, in an extraterritorial way.
Thus, it is established that this is how the migratory theme is presented and represented in the Portuguese literary field. Therefore, it is possible to consider that the 'corpus' of the works studied in this dissertation represents a heritage of the migrant storytelling which, in a cyclic and inconclusive path of return ('torna-viagem'), is manifestly rich in themes, structures and stylistic narrative ways in constant re-writing and renovation.
Keywords: Portuguese Literature; Portuguese Emigration; Literature of Migration; Stranger/Other; Rootlessness; Exile; Empire.
Public Defence date
Doctoral Programme
Supervision
Abstract
How is the migratory experience represented in Portuguese Literature?
This dissertation wants to offer an answer to this question through a study that might contribute to the comprehension of a Portuguese society's characteristic that is structuring and diversified: emigration, a persistent and remarkable feature in both the past and the present. The main objective is to outline a literary map that functions as a hermeneutic guide on the appearance and the characterization of this theme.
Therefore, it analyses representations of emigration since mid-XIXth century until the contemporaneity - in novels, short stories and chronicles - with the purpose of hypothesizing the relevance of the migratory experience in the Portuguese literary field. This path is guided by a constellation of concepts: the broad notion of empire and its repercussions in Portuguese culture as well as the differences that need to be clarified when using words such as emigration, diaspora or exile. The idea of migration becomes then stimulating and inclusive in the context of literary studies, being expanded to the observation of notions like: other/the stranger, uncanny, absence, rootlessness, hybridity and ambivalence.
Since the creation of the 'brasileiro torna-viagem' in the novels of Camilo Castelo Branco and Júlio Dinis, this character type continued to appear in new portraits, re-writings and counterpoints in the texts of the writers of 'Geração de 70' as well as in the end of the century writings of Fialho de Almeida and Trindade Coelho. The emigration is also reported as an experience in a contact zone through the discoursive compendium of the travel writings of Francisco Gomes de Amorim. In the beginning of the XXth century, these same writings are re-written and questioned in the novels by Ferreira de Castro.
In the XXth century it is possible to observe the persistence in the reformulation and denial of Camilo Castelo Brancos's paradigm through the short stories of Aquilino Ribeiro, Miguel Torga and Mário Braga. At the same time, other types of texts about emigration start to surface, where the difficulty of telling the experience of migration and its subsequent rootlessness is obvious. The geographical dispersions is not restricted to Brazil, also including other destinations like the USA and Europe. In the case of North American it is essential to highlight the narratives produced in Azores, with its mirages of America and the realistic and personified telling of the migratory experience. The European case is all about the appearance of a motley group of texts that testify with rawness the great wave of emigrants that went to France and Germany during the last two decades of the 'Estado Novo' dictatorship.
From the deep abyss of emigration come to us the reflections of Miguel Torga and the writings of exiled intellectuals like Jorge de Sena, José Rodrigues Miguéis and Manuel Alegre. Finally, we arrive to the literature published after the 25th of April of 1974, with the novels of Olga Gonçalves, Manuel da Silva Ramos, João de Melo and José Luís Peixoto. Distinguished by the processes of re-writing History and the memories of emigration, they represent the group of texts that I propose to identify with the current definition of migration literature, in an extraterritorial way.
Thus, it is established that this is how the migratory theme is presented and represented in the Portuguese literary field. Therefore, it is possible to consider that the 'corpus' of the works studied in this dissertation represents a heritage of the migrant storytelling which, in a cyclic and inconclusive path of return ('torna-viagem'), is manifestly rich in themes, structures and stylistic narrative ways in constant re-writing and renovation.
Keywords: Portuguese Literature; Portuguese Emigration; Literature of Migration; Stranger/Other; Rootlessness; Exile; Empire.