Masks of Pessoa’s Legitimating Discourse
Through his writings, either theoretical, programmatic or essays, the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa, appears as twice an anarchist: both a heteronymic and an orthonymic one. In this study, we shall analyse the cultural legitimating strategies that Pessoa, under Álvaro de Campos’s mask but also as himself, builds, thus contributing to the definition and refinement of modernist critical awareness within which scepticism will convert to stronger
reactions, futuristic visions, messianic-apocalyptic tones, becoming more complicated in the subtle architectures of irony and Dadaist palinodic cynicism, leading the European spirit into a deep reform. The current research wishes to be a contextualised analysis, of a comparative type, illustrating the tensions of the European avant-garde paradigm, forms of legitimating in the field of national and universal culture, as they appear in the theories, essays and practice of Pessoa’s arguments.
Keywords: heteronymous, cultural anarchism, irony, modernist critical awareness, cultural legitimacy, european spirit
1. Studiul este un fragment dintr-o cercetare pe care Rodica Ilie o derulează în cadrul grantului CNCSIS cod ID_760, „Discursuri culturale şi forme de legitimare în literatura
europeană a sec XX”, în calitate de director de proiect, cercetare finanţată de UEFISCSU prin contractul nr 863/ 19.01.2009.
2. Oeuvres Complètes de Fernando Pessoa, Proses, I, Publiées du vivant de l’auteur, réunies, annotées et présentées par José Blanco, Éditions de la Différence, Paris, 1988 /
Traducerile fragmentelor citate din bibliografia străină aparţin autoarei studiului.
3. Conceptul îi aparţine lui George Steiner, După Babel, Univers, Bucureşti, 1983.
