Portuguese Literary and Cultural Studies 6: On Saramago

by Anna M. Klobucka (Editor), Tagus

For many decades, José Saramago has been a staunch defender of the role of literature to both serve and be perceived as public discourse. When, in October 1998, he became the first Portuguese-language author to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, his conviction was supported by the assurance that, at any rate, this particular writer's literary discourse was guaranteed to be widely (and globally) publicized. If, as Wlad Godzich has claimed, the severely limited possibility of public discourse in the contemporary world is compensated by the ever-multiplying variety of ways to publicize discourses ("Workshop"), Saramago has taken full advantage of the opportunities offered in this respect by the Nobel prize as probably the most effective institutionalized instrument of publicity that high literary discourse which is produced worldwide has at its annual disposal. His international visibility greatly amplified, Saramago could be seen in the last two years shuttling the globe and making globally publicized statements on behalf of the many political causes that have attracted his attention and support.

336 pages, Paperback

First published November 30, 2001

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.