Embodying Pessoa: Corporeality, Gender, Sexuality

by Anna M. Klobucka (Editor)

The multifaceted and labyrinthine oeuvre of the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) is distinguished by having been written and published under more than seventy different names. These were not mere pseudonyms, but what Pessoa termed 'heteronyms,' fully realized identities possessed not only of wildly divergent writing styles and opinions, but also of detailed biographies. In many cases, their independent existences extended to their publication of letters and critical readings of each other's works (and those of Pessoa 'himself'). Long acclaimed in continental Europe and Latin America as a towering presence in literary modernism, Pessoa has more recently begun to receive the attention of an English-speaking public. Embodying Pessoa responds to this new growth of interest. The collection's twelve essays, preceded by a general introduction and grouped into four themed sections, apply a range of current interpretative models both to the more familiar canon of Pessoa's output, and to less familiar texts – in many cases only recently published. As a whole, this work diverges from traditional Pessoa criticism by testifying to the importance of corporeal physicality in his heteronymous experiment and to the prominence of representations of (gendered) sexuality in his work.

336 pages, Hardcover

First published October 13, 2007

About the author

Anna M. Klobucka holds an MA in Iberian Studies from the University of Warsaw (Poland) and a PhD in Romance Languages and Literatures from Harvard University (1993). She taught at the Ohio State University and the University of Georgia before coming to the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth in 2001. At UMass Dartmouth, she teaches primarily Portuguese and Lusophone African literatures and holds a joint appointment in the Department of Women's and Gender Studies. She served as Chair of the Department of Portuguese from 2003 to 2007. She is the author of The Portuguese Nun: Formation of a National Myth (Bucknell, 2000; Portuguese translation issued by Imprensa Nacional-Casa da Moeda in 2006) and O Formato Mulher: A Emergência da Autoria Feminina na Poesia Portuguesa (Coimbra: Angelus Novus, 2009). She has co-edited the volumes After the Revolution: Twenty Years of Portuguese Literature 1974-1994 (Bucknell University Press, 1997), Embodying Pessoa: Corporeality, Gender, Sexuality (University of Toronto Press, 2007; Portuguese translation published in 2010 by Assírio & Alvim), and Gender, Empire, and Postcolony: Luso-Afro-Brazilian Intersections (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). Her articles have appeared in Colóquio/Letras, Luso-Brazilian Review, Portuguese Literary and Cultural Studies, Slavic and Eastern European Journal, and SubStance, among other journals. She was also the lead author of the first edition of Ponto de Encontro: Portuguese as a World Language (Prentice Hall, 2007). She served as Vice-President (2003-04) and President (2005-06) of the American Portuguese Studies Association. In 2007, she was recognized as UMass Dartmouth's Scholar of the Year. She currently serves as Executive Editor of the open-access online Journal of Feminist Scholarship, published by the Department of Women's and Gender Studies at UMass Dartmouth.