March 10, 2015
Colloquium Series: Fernando Morato e Lima
We are back with another installment of the spotlight on the research of Ph.D. students as a part of the colloquium series. We have already had three wonderful and illuminating presentations from Alicia Miklos, John Petrus, and Jessica Rutherford. This week, Fernando Morato e Lima will present his work titled “The Symbolic Crossing of the Atlantic: Poetics and Politics in Silva Alvarenga’s Poems”. Fernando is completing his Ph.D. in the program in Studies of the Portuguese-Speaking World. The format of this presentation is slightly different than the others and a paper will not be distributed prior to the meeting. Nonetheless, Fernando would love to have as much feedback on his work as possible, so please join us this Friday, March 13 at 2:20pm in Hagerty Hall 255.
As per usual, we were able to interrupt Fernando’s busy graduate-student-life in order to get some additional information on his presentation. Here is what he told us:
Fernando, why did you decide to present your work in the colloquium this year? What are you hoping to get from this experience?
Presenting in the Colloquium was a suggestion of my Committee. Since I have to submit a paper and present it as one of the requirements of the Portuguese program, why not make it publicly? It is also an opportunity to share my interests and research with my colleagues, who can surely help me seeing my own work from an external point of view. Frequently, one stays so immersed in their own topic that assumptions become almost immediate, and sharing those assumptions with others helps to see gaps that were originally invisible.
Is this work a part of a bigger project? If so, can you tell us a bit about it. How did you decide on the topic? Where are you hoping to go with it? That is, what is motivating you with this research?
This work is indeed one of the many approaches I have made to my core subject, the poems of the Brazilian mixed-race poet from the late eighteenth century, Manuel Inácio da Silva Alvarenga. I have been “haunted” by this figure for almost 20 years, since I met casually with a mention of him as the “first Brazilian Literary critic”; that fascinated me and, the more I searched about him, the more I was fascinated. Not only he is one of the best neoclassical poets of the Portuguese language (for sure, the most technically skilled), but he was also a multifaceted character: poet, learned man, promoter of the theatre, science enthusiast, blamed as conjurer, owner of the largest private library in Brazil (more than 1200 volumes – a really huge number for that moment). What emerges from his works and life, for me, is a portrait of the extreme possibilities of an intellectual on the edges of the Portuguese colonies, and that brings back the thought about the limits and limitations of an intellectual in the peripheral countries nowadays.
Briefly, how has the research and writing process been? What sort of research have you done and where and what “texts” are you reading?
I am still researching Silva Alvarenga, rereading his poems and, the more I read, the more I find (as I will try to share in the Colloquium, for example). One further step is to go to the Portuguese and Brazilian archives in order to look for documents supporting my claims and to draw a more accurate portrait, either of Silva Alvagenga or of his environment. On the other hand, I hope to never give up the careful close reading from where I started and to where I should eventually return.
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Fernando’s presentation will take place this Friday, March 13 from 2:20-3:40 pm in Hagerty Hall 255. Attendance is open to the public.
