DigitUMa
Repositório Institucional da Universidade da Madeira
Entradas recentes
Tisser des souvenirs entre violence symbolique et témoignage dans la dictature brésilienne de 1964 : une expérience du Piauí
Publication . Rios, João Victor da Costa
This article analyses the multiple dimensions of authoritarianism
in Piauí during the 1964 civil-military dictatorship, highlighting
the need to understand Brazil beyond its major urban centres.
Drawing on declassified documents and activists’ memoirs, it
examines how political, symbolic, racial, and gender-based
repression affected both opponents and civilians, thereby
shaping collective memory and social relations. Mobilising the
concepts of symbolic violence, habitus, and field developed by
Pierre Bourdieu, as well as Paul Ricœur’s reflections on memory
and testimony, the study underscores the complexity of
authoritarian dynamics in peripheral contexts. The qualitative
methodology, centred on specific case studies, demonstrates
how the 1964 dictatorship targeted social profiles within local
structures and spheres of power, reinforcing inequalities and
imposing silence. The study contributes to a deeper understanding
of dictatorial practices in regions distant from the centre-south,
by analysing the traces of authoritarianism in Piauí and their
relevance to Brazilian history.
O par Pierrot/Arlequim em Almada Negreiros
Publication . Carvalho, João Pedro
This study examines the manifestations of two figures from the
commedia dell'arte, Pierrot and Harlequin, in the oeuvre of
Almada Negreiros. Owing to the diversity of their manifestations,
these figures form a particularly useful corpus for studying
interart relations in the creations of the Portuguese artist. The
manifestations of Pierrot and Harlequin across different artistic
genres are therefore compared in order to distinguish them
according to the specificities of each art form. This article is
structured into chapters that focus primarily on each of these
genres, seeking to describe a fragmentation of the artist’s oeuvre
in accordance with to the intra-artistic singularities in the
interpretation of the Pierrot/Harlequin theme. The results call
into question the conceptualization of the disappearance of
interart boundaries in Almada’s work — as exemplified by the use
of the term “Total Art” in Almadian studies.
Death of the fairy: children’s science writing and the reinvention of fairyland in nineteenth century Britain
Publication . Lago, Sofia
In this article, I examine how the nineteenth-century British
writers’ insertion of fairies into children’s science writing as a
narrative device promoted Britain as a nation that had
progressed past the age of superstition. Throughout the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, science writers like
Buckley framed their narrative through a folkloric lens rather
than adopted a scientific lens through which to frame a folklore
narrative. Through an analysis of children’s science writing and
connected texts, this article reveals the way in which the
insertion of fairies and other folklore figures into educational
works as a narrative device implicitly, or explicitly, promoted
the image of Britain as a nation that had progressed past the age
of superstition.
Between demythologization and transcendence: Faulkner’s poetics of historical trauma
Publication . Constandache, Ioana
This paper offers a critical analysis of William Faulkner’s status as
an unconventional novelist, examining how short prose decisively
contributes to the construction of his mythopoetic universe. Building
on Malcolm Cowley’s observation that Faulkner does not write
traditional novels but fragments of a discontinuous macrotext, this
study argues that narrative fragmentation—expressed through the
rejection of linearity, the plurality of voices, and temporal
distortion—constitutes the authentic mode of his literary
modernism, as evidenced in ‘‘The Bear’’ and ‘‘That Evening Sun’’.
The analysis focuses on the ways in which these short stories,
though formally autonomous, are later organically integrated into
major novels, revealing a circular compositional strategy and
Faulkner’s sustained engagement with memory and historical
consciousness. Yoknapatawpha County is approached as a
symbolic, mythical space where memory, trauma, and history
intersect within a nonlinear, stratified temporality, linking personal
experience to collective inheritance.
In contrast to Hemingway’s stylistic economy, Faulkner’s discourse
is marked by density, ambiguity, and cumulative meaning,
embodying two opposing paradigms of representing reality. In
Faulkner’s vision, myth no longer guarantees ontological stability but
becomes fluid and contested, shaped by modernity’s identity crisis,
as his narratives negotiate historical trauma and its ethical
implications. From this perspective, the paper reassesses Faulkner’s
influence on narrative postmodernism and reconsiders short prose
as the generative nucleus of a tense, original literary mythology.
O que significa “comentar” em filosofia na época do humanismo português?
Publication . Carvalho, Mário Santiago de
Sticking to the sixteenth-century Portuguese case, the present
article aims at two goals: to contribute to characterize the
philosophical commentary, and to propose a new
interpretative model of the well-known “Coimbra Course”.
Putting forward the possibility of an evolution in Pedro da
Fonseca’s mental path regarding the place of logic and
metaphysics and interpreting its implication in characterizing
the object here at stake (the philosophical commentary), the
article considers two typologies, one genetic (Góis/Couto), the
other analytical-resolutive (Fonseca), which can be sustained
by the fact that Fonseca and Manuel de Góis diverge from each
other on how to conceive the beginning of philosophy,
metaphysics for the former, physics for the latter.