Poetics and Citizenship

Recommended Prerequisites

Proficiency in English (B2).

Teaching Methods

Seminar sessions will combine lectures and discussion of texts and other materials proposed for each session, as well as oral presentations by students and written assignments.

This methodology may be subject to minor changes depending on the instructor and number of students registered.

Learning Outcomes

Students will:
• become aware of the ideological and political dimension of discourse;
• deepen their understanding of the historical and social circumstances of the (re)construction process of the word and its various hierarchies of power (namely, the genesis of abyssal thinking of modernity);
• problematize the (im)possibility of aggregation of perspective and/or discourse of post-modernity in its relation to literary modernism/art of the early twentieth century;
• understand how the concept of citizenship reconfigures the creative and/or agonist violence of an excessive and poetic space in which all the possibilities of articulation (the unsaid, the interdicted, the unheard) are found;
• extend their reading abilities and critical analysis of a literary language that is understood as fractal, rhizomal, and maps in permanent construction and deconstruction; develop skills in careful and independent research work.

Work Placement(s)

No

Syllabus

This class provides a reflection on power and language, starting with problematizing the process of secularization of the word of  law and the concept of modern citizenship. It will also address the modernist and postmodernist challenges and discuss the contemporary marginalization of poetic discourse. Two of chosen examples, theory and poetry L = A = N = G = U = A = G = E and the poetry of Portuguese emigrants in the USA - in its national and vanguardíst decentralization, respectively - produce a deterritorialization of the word that is manifested in a formalistic anti-formalism, questioning the centers and margins (the text, the nation and the subject). This is an emancipatory effort that contributes towards a project that is radically political and cosmopolitan in its rejection of ideological "lyricism", in its refusal of hierarchies of power in discourse, in its choice of a minor literature (defined by wandering and nomadism) as an exercise of citizenship.

Head Lecturer(s)

Graça Maria Constantino Nunes de Oliveira Capinha

Assessment Methods

Assessment
Other: 40.0%
Research work: 60.0%

Bibliography

Barbalet, J. M. (1989) A Cidadania. Lisboa: Estampa
Bernstein, Ch. (ed.).(1993)The Politics of Poetic Form. Poetry and Public Policy. New York: Roof Books
Dante Alighieri. (1996) Monarchy. Cambridge:CUP
Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1986). Kafka:Toward a Minor Literature. Minneapolis: U. Minnesota Press
Fairclough, N. (2001). Language and Power. Harlow: Pearson Education Ltd.
Foucault, M. (1988). As Palavras e as Coisas. Lisboa: Ed.70
Kantorowicz, E. H. (1985) The King’s Two Bodies. A Study in Medieval Political Theology. Princeton:Princeton U.P
Perloff, M. (1986). The Futurist Moment. Avant-Garde, Avant Guerre, and the Language of Rupture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Rousseau, J-J. (1968)Discurso sobre a origem e os fundamentos da desigualdade entre os homens. Lisboa: Portugália
Santos, B. S. (2007).“Para além do pensamento abissal: das linhas globais a uma ecologia de saberes”.http://www.ces.uc.pt/myces/UserFiles/livros/150_Para%20alem%20do%20pensamento%20abissal_RCCS78.pdf