Got the result for the second of the exams. It arrived via a completely different route from the other, contributing to my impression that the Universidade Aberta’s systems are a bit more random than the Open University in Britain. Anyway, never mind. As for my own performance, well, it was pretty terrible. Worse than expected, even. 7/12, which is only just over the pass mark. Luckily, this one has 40% for continual evaluation though, and I did pretty well in that so the average was dragged up. 13.7/20 which is what? 65 +3.5 = 68.5%. That’s not bad really! If I’d had 5 more minutes for a quick grammar check Iºd have probably gone up 5 or 10%, I think, but it was not to be!
The final stage of the course is starting now: Literatura e Cultura Portuguesas – Época Contemporânea. It seems to be all about the colonial wars and the end of empire and there are three set books, two of which I have read already and one is on my TBR: respectively “O Retorno” (Dulce Maria Cardoso), “A Costa dos Murmúrios” (Lídia Jorge) and “Os Cus de Judas” (António Lobo Antunes). I’m excited to get started because I enjoyed the first two books but don’t remember them well, so a guided re-read of them would be great, and Os Cus de Judas comes highly recommended too!
And it’s not exactly easy to find. Nobody told me I had passed or anything but according to the site I got “18.00”. OK, well fine but out of what? Not 18% I hope!
I had to go back to the course description in the end and it says that…
O Exame Final consiste numa única prova escrita, realizada na plataforma WISEFlow e classificada numa escala de 0 (zero) a 20 (vinte) valores.
So… I think I got 90%! Pretty pleased with that! The pass mark is only 50, and 90% is way beyond what I’ve got in any exam since O-Levels, so yeah, pretty pleased!
I’ve just finished the literature exam. I think I gave pretty solid answers, but I was much more pressed for time in this one than the last and crucially didn’t have time to go back and fix typos. And the browser they use for the exams doesn’t even have spellcheck or any of the other features I take for granted when writing here, say, so I imagine I will be losing some marks for my shit grammar.
Chewing over other things I probably could have done better, I discussed a narrative told to the narrator by a character she interviews and I probably should have slipped the word “intradiegético” in there somewhere. Likewise, when discussing other forms of art used as framing devices in Os Memoráveis (the fact that they are making a film, and the fact that they have a photograph with them which they are using the jog people’s memories) I think I explained the mechanism pretty well but I should have used the word “intermediality”. Just throwing away points, there.
Half way through, a parakeet came and landed on the bird feeder near where I’m sitting. It’s really only for little birds like robins and tits, so if I see a parakeet, a crow or a pigeon out there I usually chuck a pen, or whatever is to hand, at the window to scare them away. This time I only had my wallet so I threw that, realising, just as it left my hand, that the window was open in the direction i was throwing. Luckily, I hit the glass and disaster was averted. Imagine how embarrassing it would be to have to come on here and say “Well, I was failed for leaving the table for 3 minutes while I ran downstairs to retrieve my credit cards from the pavement after lobbing them at a ring-necked parakeet”!
Since the final exam of the literature module starts in an hour and a quarter, I might have left the revision a bit late. In truth, I haven’t even finished the third book. It took me ages to get into it although now I have, I am flying along but I haven’t reached the end. Oh well, never mind, I can finish it in my own good time
Conceitos
Intermedialidade
A intermedialidade é a possibilidade de descobrirmos interações entre discursos em mediáticos autónomos: livros, filmes, bandas desenhadas podem dialogar entre eles.
-> e intertextualidade é um sub-genero disto.
Transnarratividade
A transnarratividade é a disseminação da narratividade em práticas para além das narrativas formalmente constituídas como tais.
Transmedialidade
A transmedialidade trata-se de uma passagem de uma narrative de uma forma para outra. Por exemplo, uma adaptação de um livro no cinema.
Figuração
Processo de construir uma “figura” ou seja um “ser de papel” (Barthes, citado por Carlos Reis) o que não se restringe a uma aceção personalista ‘ veja por exemplo a Casa do Ramalhete d’Os Maias ou a Manderley no Rebecca. “Os Cinco Mil” é um exemplo disto
Liberalismo e romantismo – interlogados
Oitecentista
Extradiegetica « o narador
Intradiegetica – contado por uma personagem
Metadiegética – dito por uma pessoa em curso de uma narrativa contado por uma personagem!
Viagens na Minha Terra
1846 – entre 1789 e 1848! (uau! a serio?)
Joaninha – Ultrapassa o arquétipo da “Mulher Anjo” ou mulher siflide – “a menina dos rouxinois
Carlos – herói liberal de sangue quente, dividida entre a Georgiana e a Joaninha. “Rousseauniano” . Acaba gordo e um deputado.
Frei Dinis – Inflexível, consciente do seu grande pecadp
A terra como figura
“Fashionável”
Trio em Lá Menor
Os Memoráveis
“De todos os testemunhos, sem dúvida o mais emotivo aquele que é dado pela viúva de Charlie 8 “o rapaz dos tanques e dos chaimites”, aquele que pôs o relógio da história a andar, mas que o regime maltratou, negando-lhe uma pensão que não negou aos torcionários da pide.” here
I love a dad joke and this is a good example of the genre. It’s a good example of how prepositions in Portuguese are often different from what we’d expect on English. Where we would say “You can count on me” as a way of saying I’ll always be there when you need me, in Portuguese you say “Podes contar comigo” (You can count with me”. So…
Or at least I think it did. The exam has just finished. It was only an hour and 45 minutes. The assignment had two parts:
The first was to rewrite a text that had a load of errors in it. For example, it said the aim of the course was to see how Portuguese identity had changed and the role of literature on this process, which true to a certain extent, but that’s not the stated objective of the course. Then it said that there were four key figures of the course. I rather snippily added a parenthesis saying it was three individuals and a couple. I suppose arguably two couples but the Marquês of Chamilly has no rights. We do not stan. The four, it claimed, reinforced traditional stereotypes (yeah, sure, Brites de Almeida is a typical girly girl). It described Teorema by Herberto Hélder but made some straightforward mistakes – the identity of the protagonist, his first name, and the centuries in which the story takes place. The story is so good that I was able to spot the mistakes pretty well, except that the text said it took place in Santarém and I honestly have no idea where it’s meant to have happened, so although I thought it was probably wrong, I left it as it was.
The second question just asked in what way this statue represents Dom João II. I had included it in my revision first thing this morning, so I had all the vocabulary to hand.
Where might I have gone wrong?
Well, first of all, the setup of the question seems to imply that there are certain indisputible mistakes in the first text. I thought some of them were a bit debatable and probably waffled on a bit, explaining to what extent I thought the statements were false and why. But I still finished early, so… Well, i surely wasn’t supposed to do less was I?
And secondly, in expressing my fascination with the story of the Portuguese letters, I came down pretty unambiguously on the side of the non-marianistas. The question didn’t really ask for a discussion of the pros and cons of this point of view so I thought I was pretty safe there but I’ve probably expressed it too strongly. I say she was the victim of a lie (because tbe letters were probably fake) but now I think of it again, I wonder if it comes across as me saying the romance itself didn’t happen. That was probably clumsy.
On the whole, I really enjoyed this challenge. It was nice to write a piece of graded work in an exam setting where the aim was to communicate, and to make a particular case, and not to be grammatically correct. I checked the grammar, of course, but the grammar wasn’t the point, as it would have been in a CAPLE exam.
I got a solid 3.4/4.0 in the essay about Dom Joâo II. That’s 85% – God, I’d have killed for marks like that in the degree courses I took in IT and computing. I made a lot of silly grammatical errors that I should have picked up in editing, but in spite of everything, he noted that I have shown that I had an original and distinctive take on the subject, and I feel quite pleased with that!
As Sombras de D. João II
Anyway, I need to start revising, so I am going to go through it in detail, fix the mistakes and think about what could be improved. Again, this is just for my own benefit, but if you’re following along, the challenge was to analyse the title and subtitle of this thriller and decide what it means, referring to what we know about the real (historic) and fictional (in legend, propaganda and media representations) person that is Dom João II. I’ll fix all the boring typos and comment on the mistakes that are interesting enough to say something about. I’m indebted to the teacher who took the time to correct the grammar but didn’t penalise me for it as I suspect he probably could have!
Introdução
Neste texto, vou tentar decifrar o significado do título e o subtítulo deste livro, mas antes de começar, é necessário perguntar “o significado para quem?” Raras vezes todos os leitores de um livro concordam sobre a interpretação de um livro. Então o nosso pensamento deve começar com o autor e a imagem que ele quer criar na mente do leitor. Mas a visão do autor não é isolada, separada da cultura e da sociedade onde vive. O seu retrato do rei tem de ser reconhecível para os leitores, ou seja, tem de ter alguma semelhança com a pessoa de João II promulgada* nas escolas e na média. Ao mesmo tempo, um autor de romances históricos sabe bem que os seus leitores querem mais do que factos, nus e crus. Se quisessem isso, teriam comprado alguma coisa da estante não-ficção. Assim podemos imaginar o autor a pensar nas várias narrativas ao longo dos anos. Não sendo historiador nem propagandista, o autor de ficção histórica é livre para escolher os aspetos da lenda que satisfazem os seus critérios.
Como o Título Chama a Atenção dos Leitores
Em primeiro lugar, a palavra “Sombras” pode ser interpretada de várias maneiras. Pode-se imaginar uma montanha ou um castelo a assombrar o território à sua volta por causa da sua imensidade. Uma sombra, então, é símbolo da imponente estatura da figura do rei nos olhos do povo. Por outro lado, a palavra sugere o lado obscuro de um governo e a sua rede de espiões. E em terceiro lugar, é fácil imaginar o rei como um protagonista assombrado pelas suas próprias dúvidas.
Destes três, a primeira explicação é a menos satisfatória. Um castelo tem uma sombra e mais nada, mas a palavra no título é plural. Quanto aos outros significados, o site da editora (Clube do Autor, 2026) fornece amplas provas de ambas. Talvez a única frase mais reveladora do seu assombramento e o do seu povo é “No meio de tudo isto, há um homem de lágrima fácil e íntimo cruel, um verdadeiro manancial de sentimentos por decifrar.”
Noutras palavras, ao** leitor está a ser prometido emoções turbulentas por parte de um rei que anteriormente teria parecido opaco e ainda por cima um enredo cheio de surpresas e que – quem sabe – é capaz de pôr em causa a nossa imagem do Príncipe Perfeito.
Como o Subtítulo Os*** Seduz Ainda Mais
À primeira vista, o subtítulo, “Sonho, glória, poder e intriga. Os bastidores de um reinado de ouro.” garante uma visão do rei que é mais tradicional e mais normativa: o rei levou a cabo uma onda de descobrimentos cruciais para o futuro do país e do continente europeu, trazendo glória, poder e riqueza para os participantes e para o trono. Na verdade, a legacia**** dele é altamente discutível, como vemos na obra da Mafalda Soares de Cunha que mostra exemplos de historiadores serem acusados, desde o século XVII de (entre outras coisas) “[…] omitir uma série de informações importantes, como é o caso do seu papel no progresso da gesta expansionista… (Cunha 1988 pp 651) mas isso não altera a reputação do rei na imaginação pública. O seu nome é quase sinónimo dos descobrimentos, é óbvio no “Mensagem” de Fernando Pessoa, a sua mitologia poética do passado de Portugal, onde o rei aparece não só no poema que tem o seu nome onde ele parece “uma alta serra”***** (Pessoa 1934 pp 44) (e, indubitavelmente, assombra o promontório onde está!) mas também em “O Mostrengo” o navegador leva o nome dele como um talismã contra os perigos do mar****** (Pessoa 1934 pp 57)
Aqui ao leme sou mais do que eu: Sou um Povo que quer o mar que é teu; E mais que o mostrengo, que me a alma teme E roda nas trevas do fim do mundo; Manda a vontade, que me ata ao leme, De El-Rei D. João Segundo!
Adriana Bebiano afirma que a precariedade do mundo atual (ela estava a escrever logo depois dos atentados de 2001) produzia um desejo de regressar ” a representações identitárias onde se observa um excesso de passado” (Bebiano, 2002 pp 534) e que, no caso de Portugal, esta tendência era caracterizada por “a quase omnipresença da gesta marítima” (ibid) como o navio na capa deste romance.
Para Jorge Sousa Correia, escrevendo nos anos vinte deste século, a confiança na autoridade está catastroficamente reduzida e andamos rodeados por teorias de conspiração. Daí, não é nada surpreendente que vejamos neste título e seu subtítulo, uma combinação da glória radiante do passado, salpicada de tons mais escuros, representando a sombra de dúvida no que diz respeito ao líder daquela época dourada*******.
*I should really have said divulgada or propalada. I was really going for something that indicated the image was being put out as a sort of “official version” of events but it turns out I don’t really know what promulgated means even in my own language!
**Over-literal translation here. In english we’d say “the reader is being promised something” but that doesn’t work in portuguese; you have to say something is being promised TO the reader
***This is meant to follow on from the previous heading: having caught the eye of his readers he is seducing them further, but with such a long gap in between it was confusing, so the marker was left scratching his head and wondering who the hell I’m on about
****Woah! This falso amigo really surprised me. I should have said “legado” which means legacy. Legacia refers to the office of a legate!
*****Part of the instructions were that you had to quote something from the mandatory readings and believe it or not there three words are me paying lip service to that rule, because this poem is one of the texts. The marker didn’t notice – perhaps understandably, given how titchy it was, and I think I lost points as a result. Well, it’s a fair cop!
******I’m really not happy with this whole section, highlighted in yellow. It seems like a real tangle of thoughts. The prof didn’t penalise me for it, but I wish I had taken half an hour to straighten it out a bit and order it better.
*******I think the conclusion here went down well. I was quite pleased with it. I was criticised for not going into the “sombras” as much as I could have by referring to the death of his son or or the aristocrats he had bumped off. To be fair, neither of those is really referenced in the blurb and I had the impression the writer wasn’t really focusing on them, but OK, fair enough, maybe I should have gone darker!
Bibliografia
Bebiano, Adriana (2002) A invenção da raiz. Representações da nação na ficção portuguesa e irlandesa contemporâneas em Ramalho, Maria Irene e Ribeiro, António Sousa Entre Ser e Estar (2002) (pp 503-537)
I submitted the second essay of the second course the day before yesterday.
The challenge was to take the cover of this juicy historical thriller and try and analyse what currents of cultural understanding the writer was drawing on in his presentation of the novel.
It wasn’t a subject I felt very drawn to, I would rather have done the Randy Nun, but I managed OK. Well, I had some good ideas anyway. To be honest if I hasn’t been so tired I might have spent half an hour switching up the order of the lines in some of the paragraphs to make the argument flow better, but I think it’ll do OK.
Luso 