Unruly daughters: complications of epic and identity in 20th and 21st century Portuguese women’s poetry

Thesis

This thesis considers the contributions made by Natália Correia, Luiza Neto Jorge and Ana Luísa Amaral towards re-visioning the male-authored canon, particularly Luís de Camões’s Os Lusíadas (1572), Álvaro de Campos’s ‘Ode marítima’ (1915), and Fernando Pessoa’s Mensagem (1934). Complicating the epic genre from within by activating its own latent contradictions, these feminist poets articulate unconventional notions of authorship and subjectivity, as well as alternative civic destinies, and even non-teleological alternatives to the concept of destiny itself.

Correia, Neto Jorge and Amaral create works which speculate on how the epic might be told in unruly, disorientating, and spectral ways, inverting masculinist assumptions about Portuguese history and grappling with how the national imaginary is haunted by the ghosts of the past. In the process, they imagine what might come from inflecting the national consciousness with the untapped potential of the marginalized - of women, the colonized, and the nonhuman; deconstruct national teleology; interrogate the nostalgic relationship the nation has nurtured with its seafaring past; and un-map the world Portugal has sought to know through its imperialist endeavours and anthropocentric vision.

Correia’s Cântico do país emerso (1961) examines failed masculine heroic endeavours and repressed imperial trauma, and constructs a female-centred utopian vision rooted in a process of personal becoming-bodily and national re-birth. Neto Jorge’s Dezanove Recantos (1969) complicates epic by disarranging linearity and disrupting teleology, with its rhizomatic structure and surrealist style. Meanwhile, Amaral, ‘[embarca] sem mapa até ao fim/ do escuro’ (Escuro, 2014), reconceiving marginalisation and absence as generative forces, so that ‘The feminine [may be] re-defined as a moving horizon, a fluctuating path, a recipe for transformation, motion, becoming’ (Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory, 2011: p.114).

Invoking literary heritage, these poetry collections develop an oppositional consciousness, through feminist, queer, posthuman countermemory and countergenealogies. Together they showcase how the marginalised feminine voice can provide alternative utopian possibilities.

Authors: Stuart-Thompson, A

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-nzoxdaaen
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English and Portuguese
• Keywords: Fernando Pessoa; surrealism; queer spectrality; Luiza Neto Jorge; Natália Correia; female authorship; Ana Luísa Amaral; colonial trauma; Luís de Camões; complicated epic poetry; countergenealogy; utopianism; dis-anthropocentrism; unruly feminism; queer theory; countermemory
• Subjects: Surrealism; Queer theory; Avant-garde (Poetics); Utopias in literature; Poetry; Portuguese; Literature; Epic poetry; Feminism and literature; Rewriting the canon