Uma árvore de gestos. Vazio e promessa na poesia de José Augusto Mourão
This essay aims to provide a reading of the poetry of José Augusto Mourão, highlighting the way it draws a biblical representation of man as a pilgrim on earth. His poetry also claims for a particular understanding of pray as a transmutational way of transcending the world, since it metamorphoses both time and space: future becomes present and desert a universal temple.
Using some of Georges Bataille’s concepts, we observe in Al Berto’s writings a holiness of transgression which, through excess and dissolution, leads to his sacred metamorphoses.
Mulher sem nome: santidade (im)possível – Doroteia de Hélia Correia
In this short story by Hélia Correia, a nameless figure, whose existence depends solely on her condition of woman and mother, emerges throughout the narrative. Considered to be a sinner, she is judged and condemned by a society searching for social and moral balance, and devotes herself to rituals of sacrifice and penance. It is, however, through rebellion and her love for her daughter that she reenacts the sacred and ultimately reaches sanctity.
Transfigurações do sagrado nos contos de Cristóvão de Aguiar
Religiosity is an important theme in Cristóvão de Aguiar’s short stories, particularly Azorean religiosity, portrayed through an ironic, critical and irreverent point of view. In this study, we reflect upon aspects that shape this vision, giving special attention to the most representative characters and to the opposition between two notions of the sacred: one that is attached to an embracing, innocent and luminous Christianity, which respects human nature and is open to questioning and to reinterpretation; and one that is advocated by the Catholic doctrine, represented by a clergy accomplice of war and of oppression.
Homo Sacer: Francisco de Assis e a (bio)politização da santidade em José Saramago
This essay focuses on José Saramago’s play A Segunda Vida de Francisco de Assis proposes the hermeneutic reassessment of the Poverello of Assisi’s sanctity in the light of Bakhtine’s concept of exotopy and Agamben’s formulation of biopower, by underlining the relevance of the definition of the homo sacer for the critical understanding of the figure of the saint recreated by Saramago.
The short essay of Vergílio Ferreira about Saint Francis of Assisi and those of Eça de Queirós about cardinal Mannig and Antero de Quental serve as a point of departure and arrival, respectively, for an analysis of literary and critic texts on the subject of holiness. If this is a shared and consensual concept, its realization in the image of the saint generates several representations according to times, cultures and even needs, and is even extended to some non-canonized that stand out for exceptional human qualities, approaching those who received the honors of the altar.
O grotesco e o apelo do maravilhoso em “Maria do Ahú”, de José Régio
In this text it is considered the way how the grotesque, the appeal of the wonderful and social issues are intertwined in the short story by José Régio, “Maria do Ahú”. It consists in a fine example of the writer’s mastery of the mentioned genre.
São Paulo, “Poeta da Loucura”, na visão de Teixeira de Pascoaes
Pascoaes claims that sin and remorse are more prolific than virtue. Based on this belief, he constructs the biography of the young Jew Paul of Tarsus, merciless persecuter of the Christians, who, after the death of Steven, the first martyr, had a vision in which God addressed to him. He was then converted and became Paul the Apostle, the divine Poet of Insanity, as Pascoaes calls him. And with the same passionate insanity he had put in chasing Him, Paul began to defend the Christ and spread His teachings to both Jews and pagans, regardless of fatigue, punishment or imprisonment, until he was made a martyr himself. In his first Epistle to the Corinthians, Paul proclaims that “If any one among you considers himself wise in this age, let him become a fool so as to become wise” (1 Cor 3, 16-23).
A sagração da luxúria, segundo Raul Leal
For Raul Leal, lust and the sacrifice of the body are two complementary and vertiginous forms of freeing the Spirit and experiencing God-Satan. This is a human design, based on the idea that Immensity (God) exists in each one of us, as well as each one of us exists in Immensity (in God).
Hagiografias seculares: metamorfose ou rotura?
The discourse about saints and sanctity is part of the semantic field of religion. In Agiológio Rústico, a book published by Tomás da Fonseca in 1957, we find ten brief narratives that draw the profile of men and women of the rural world whose lives, simple and hardworking, honorable and sympathetic, turn them into true heroes of the everyday life. They are the anonymous saints, worthy of seeing their virtues celebrated in secular hagiographies. With theses hagiographies, the author does not only amplify the number and nature of types of sanctity. Above all, he wants to subvert the premises of traditional religious hagiography.
A hagiografia em Raul Brandão – para uma poética da santidade
Profanando o improfanável: fetos em arte
The aim of this essay is to reflect on the increasing visibility of the embryo and fetus which, due to ever more sophisticated imaging techniques, have become iconic images of the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The fetus, often shown alone, detached from the maternal body, suggests the (partial) elision of the mother from the reproductive cycle, in the context of new reproductive technologies such as in vitro fertilization. From religious art of the Middle Ages where the Virgin’s pregnancy was mostly hidden to the contemporary representations of an increasingly secular and autonomous fetus, the profanatory potential of these images will be discussed. Special attention will be given to the work of artists Suzanne Anker, Helen Chadwick and Damien Hirst, as well as the writer Sylvia Plath, who through their representations of fetuses compel us to rethink contemporary and future medical practices as well as the changing cultural meanings attached to those images that increasingly circulate in our contemporary world, dominated as it is by a visual and genetic imaginary. These works will be analysed mainly through the lens of theoretical writings by historians of science such as Donna Haraway and Sarah Franklin, as well as philosophers Paul Virilio and Giorgio Agamben.
A santidade em metamorfose entre a Teologia e a Literatura
The aim of this present research is to examine the meaning of life as a Theopathodicy. This theoretical construction results from the Theology´s openness to issue understanding as theo-logy in the query about the meaning [logos] of God [Theós], in the human search for meaning, and thus resulting in what we call poetic theological thought as a way of uncovering meaning, as well as a proper way to make explicit the existential element of theological formulas for a thinking loan of Literature.
This essay aims to delineate the boundaries between Literature and Religion. Firstly, we show Literature using Religion as a theme or rhetorical device. Then, we examine Religion using rhetorical-persuasive literary devices to convey its teachings. Finally, we attempt to draw the border line where Literature and Religion mingle and separate, assuming their intrinsic characteristics.
Entre o pathos e a salvação: uma leitura do sentimento religioso em Os contos do tio Joaquim
In Rodrigo Paganino’s work, Os contos do tio Joaquim, the religious sentiment determines the existence of the human being from an early age to the time of their death. In this course there is a succession of losses, reunions, and the resumption of dialogues, so often interrupted between humanity and divinity. The religion makes itself present in Paganino’s work through religious beliefs, Christian principles and values, the conception of the village priest character, liturgical rituals, biblical passages, images and characters from the Christian tradition, as well as through the symbols of religious thought. The religious discourse of popular nature also plays an important role in this matter.
Deus e Diabo na ótica transgressora de Machado de Assis
We take two texts from Machado de Assis – the short story “A Igreja do Diabo” (Histórias sem Data, 1884) and a chapter of the novel Memórias Póstumas de BrásCubas (1881) in order to discuss the destabilizing vision of the Brazilian writer as refers to pre-established and institutionalized values in the religious sphere. Innovative construction procedures are used in his fictional narrative to give body to the critical position of the writer, who reverses hierarchies and plays skillfully with language, whether through irony, the subversion of proverbs, the redemption of dialogue with tradition. In Machado, the reader is asked to participate actively in the reception of his texts, because the meanings are unpredictable as well as the structure of the language, which accentuates the revolutionary role of the literature. the revolutionary role of the literature.
O tópos do paganismo na crítica e na estética literária: Pessoa e Botto
The autonomization of the æsthetico-expressive sphere, along with the concomitant figure of the artist as the pursuer of an authentic art of living, alien to social, moral and ideological codes, stands for the ultimate condition of the defense and illustration of António Botto qua æsthete by Fernando Pessoa. The topos of paganism is the axis of the pessoan claim, aimed at proving that Botto’s work stands for a modern revival of pure helenic æstheticism. However, the ensuing public, politico-moral debate raised by Botto’s work and its defense by Pessoa would expose the inherent frailties of the claim of pagan æstheticism. José Régio still resorts to it, but quite precariously and Jorge de Sena definetely surmounts it.
Santas e Histéricas: a neurose mística na neo-hagiografia naturalista
The fin-de-siècle obsession for mystical neurosis, conspicuous in the work of innumerable naturalistic writers, has intentionally highlighted what in that pathologization of virtue appeared as unquestionably gendered and could hence be ascribed to a specifically female psychophysiology. Drawing from essentialist gender stereotypes, the hysteria diagnosis has acted, particularly when interrelated with female mysticism, as a powerful ideological tool of biosocial cataloging which literary fiction has predictably echoed. In this article, we seek to reexamine the relationship between hysteria and sanctity, as represented in naturalistic fiction, by focusing on two paradigmatic novels: Abel Botelho’s Santa Adosinda and Teixeira de Queirós’s Amor Divino.
Metamorfoses da santidade de um santo irrequieto. “Como um vento de morte e de ruína”: disforias anterianas
Through the moto “Like a wind of death and ruin,” a polidiscursive and polyphonic text was built, in which appear - within a motivated and parafrastic order that shows the dysphoric tone of Antero de Quental’s sonnets - samples of the metamorphoses of the great poetry moments of the Saint-poet, as well as the poetic drama of his last moments.
This paper shows how the theme of Holiness was represented in the Baroque fiction that has strong relationships with the spiritual treatises from de same period and establishes the basic allegories as pilgrimage and psicomaquia. These allegories are present in brief episodes of transmutation between appearance and truth. However, most important is the inner metamorphosis and the figuration of the human soul from the deception to the disappointment.
A santidade do poema: ascese da forma, metamorfose dos símbolos em Orides Fontela
This essay discusses the proximity between the formal depuration, that is present in the poetry of Orides Fontela, and the spiritual asceticism, ancient practice of the Western tradition. I discuss the concept of holiness, in its conventional sense, to develop the proposed reflection; then, I think of the possible links between poetry and religious experience in the modern world and conclude with an analytical commentary of some Orides Fontela´s poems in order to define the status of the poetic work against the sacred.
As etapas da santidade em Cecília Meireles
We intend to show how Cecília Meireles (1901-1964) outlined the stages of Holiness in her Poetics. To this end, we consider the narratives of her childhood, Olhinhos de Gato (1938-1940), Oratório de Santa Clara (1955), Romance de Santa Cecília (1957), and Oratório de Santa Maria Egipcíaca (1957). The theoretical framework is the poetic (literary) image in Gaston Bachelard’s thought.
A santidade como “aprendizagem do pequeno sofrimento” no romance Fronteira, de Cornélio Penna
In Fronteira, Cornélio Penna’s premiere novel, Maria Santa is prepared for the great day in which she will perform yet another of her miracles. This article analyzes the way Penna’s novel explores the theme of sainthood from a context in which transgressive acts reveal the truth about the human condition - its limits and its misery - and thereby generate a space in which God seems increasingly present. This path to sainthood is punctuated by vertical encounters with suffering, the possibility of transcending that suffering, and the risk of becoming disheartened when faced with the impossibility of discerning the purpose of one’s own existence.
Vozes do sagrado em Lavoura arcaica, novela de Raduan Nassar
This paper studies the narrative strategies, used by Raduan Nassar in Lavoura arcaica, that show a perspective of the sacred and of the sanctity.
Entre Santos: metamorfoses da sacralidade em Machado de Assis
The following paper aims to analize the rhetoric games used by Machado de Assis narrator in “Entre Santos”, mainly those sacred/secular metamorphosis experimented by the human condition.
Homo Viator sentado: uma novela de João Paulo Borges Coelho
In the novella “O pano encantado”, João Paulo Borges Coelho reactivates the Homo Viator motif, associating it with a whimsical and artistic pilgrimage to Mecca.
Adjetivar santos: um estudo linguístico de pagelas
Marking different moments of religious experience or supporting the devotion of believers, holy cards are multimodal texts, combining language and iconic representations, with a stabilized textual superstructure. In this research, a corpus of these cards is analysed for these parameters, as well as the names, adjectives and metaphors used in the description of the saints.
Quando jesus não é cristo: a poesia agónica de José Régio
Na poesia de José Régio, a figura de Jesus Cristo aparece cindida, à semelhança do que acontece com a imagem lírica do poeta.
José Régio foi educado num ambiente de grande religiosidade mas a partir da adolescência e, ainda mais, após a doença e morte da mãe, a sua fé vacila e ele começa a questionar os conceitos que lhe tinham ensinado e que asua razão tem dificuldade em aceitar, embora confesse não poder viver sem Deus. Nunca deixou, porém, de tercomo ideal de vida os preceitos cristãos, sobretudo de castidade, de caridade e de verdade, travando uma lutadolorosa contra as solicitações da carne, por um lado, e, por outro, uma irritação profunda contra, sobretudo, quem criticava as suas obras. Considerando ser o teatro a forma literária por excelência para exprimir a sua personalidade multifacetada e contraditória, confessa uma íntima preferência pelo drama Benilde ou a Virgem‑Mãe, no qual equaciona o problema do pecado, da culpa, da inocência e da redenção.
Aquilino Ribeiro, uma luz ao longe – “ter olhos que a descubram”
Analisam‑se, neste artigo, as modulações do sentimento religioso documentadas na multímoda produção ficcional de Aquilino Ribeiro, da nostalgia do sagrado à mais violenta eclesiofobia, concedendo particular destaque à autobiografia romanceada de Uma Luz ao Longe.