Literature: Tradition and Archive
This area focuses on various branches of literary studies – modernism, women’s writing, literary theory and teaching, Brazilian literature and traditional literature – based on a wide range of approaches that promote close links between hermeneutics and the analysis of the materiality of literature. Considering different literary traditions and their archival dimension, it is organised into several team projects, which pursue their own objectives and a common strategy.
Estranhar Pessoa, Diálogos portugueses, Ensino da Literatura, Escritoras portuguesas no tempo da Ditadura Militar e do Estado Novo em Portugal, África, Ásia e países de emigração, Modern!smo.pt, RELIT-Rom: a aplicação criativa de romances (Portugal, séc. XV-XVIII), Ruy Cinatti, etnógrafo e poeta.
Coordinator: Pedro Sepúlveda
Interarts Studies
It is structured around two lines of work that constantly strive to engage in dialogue: ‘Literature, Philosophy, Arts’, which focuses mainly on the theoretical, conceptual and philosophical aspects of inter-artistic research, and ‘SPECULUM: Arts and Materiality’, which explores the self-reflective capacity of inter-artistic phenomena through the analysis of the materiality of objects. The group’s objectives are: 1) to contribute to the ontological problematisation of the various arts in the current field of comparative studies; and 2) to map the problematic intersection between the arts, both at the level of academic or theoretical production and at the level of cultural and artistic production. Of particular note is the GHOST project — Spectrality: Literature and Arts (Portugal and Brazil)
The Environmental Humanities research group promotes a transdisciplinary approach to the literary phenomenon in dialogue with history, philosophy, ethology, anthropology, ecology, and the life sciences. Inspired by the pioneering work of Lawrence Buell (who laid the foundations of ecocriticism in the 1990s and developed particularly relevant operational concepts in this field, such as «environmental imagination» [1995] and «environmental unconscious» [2001]), and more recently from the theoretical approaches proposed by ecopoetics (Pierre Schoentjes, Kate Rigby) and zoopoetics (Anne Simon), the Environmental Humanities research line is not only a critical response to anthropocentrism or a mere study of the privileged relationship between literature and nature in its many dimensions and implications. As a plea for decentration and a challenge to rethink the unstable, porous and transformative boundaries between humans, the vast universe of living beings and the environment in which they live and share (whether it be the natural environment or the toxic universe of urban industrial landscapes), it is, above all, an invitation to deterritorialise or decolonise the very concepts through which we define literature, and thus an invitation to epistemologically rethink the place that literature and literary studies occupy (or can occupy) in the world and in relation to other disciplines and forms of knowledge. This research area is currently structured around three main projects: 1) LITESCAPE.PT – Atlas of Literary Landscapes of Mainland Portugal; 2) DIAITA – Lusophony Food Heritage; 3) Imaginaries of the Sea (in partnership with the UNESCO Chair “The Cultural Heritage of the Oceans” | CHAM – Centre for Humanities).
Coordinator: Carlos F. Clamote Carreto