Bio
Marco Bucaioni (1981), currently Research Fellow at CLEPUL, School of Arts and Humanities, University of Lisbon, Portugal. Co-PI of the ongoing research project (2021-2023) AFROLAB–Building African Literatures. Institutions and consecration inside andoutside the Portuguese-Language Space 1960-2020. Previously Post-Doctoral Researcher at the same research centre. PhD (Comparative Literature, 2013) and MA (Foreign Languages and Literature, 2006) at the University of Perugia, Italy. Also literary translator, with special attention towards contemporary African and Portuguese production. Currently working on the world circulation of African literatures written in Portuguese through translation. Research interests: World-Literature; Translation Studies;Modernity and Modernism; Postcolonial and Decolonial discourse.
The Years that Changed the Dominant Poetics. Literary Modernity in the Portuguese Novel 1963-1980
The decade preceding the Carnation Revolution (1974) and the years immediately following it can be considered to be a turning point in literary aesthetic, restructuring the dominant poetics of Portuguese literature. Under the conditions in which Portuguese intellectuals worked at the time of the regime, Portuguese literature entrenched itself,delaying its development towards contemporary aesthetic turns of more central areas of the World-Literary System.The begin of the colonial wars (1961) and the general climate of renewal began to carve up a new space for a peculiar realization of literary modernity in Portugal. Neorealist tendencies gave way to more irrealistic-dominated techniques and horizons, starting from Almeida Faria’s Rumor Branco (1962) and A Paixão (1965) and Nuno Bragança’s A Noite eo Riso (1969). The French nouveau roman, Faulkner’s, Céline’s examples are among these novelties. In those years, also Maria Velho da Costa’s and José Cardoso Pires’ prose can be seen as an attempt of modernity realization. This period created the perfect conditions for an aesthetic renewal which had to be carried out with the tools of irrealism, because of censorship and political and social turmoil. This climate led to the emergence of the post-revolutionary generation which fixed the contemporary canon of Portuguese fiction-prose until today (for example José Saramago, Lobo Antunes, Lídia Jorge). In their first published works one sees how the conditions of literary creation in Portugal were at that time similar, somehow, to the disorientation of authors after WWI and along the 1920s in Europe. Modernist examples, indeed, played a central role in this renewal.This communication’s aims are to investigate this season as a turning point in Portuguese literary aesthetics; underscore how the “literary regime” which these years inaugurated lasts until today and weigh this against the development of World-Literature.