Um navio de papel com emigrados que me dizem adeus: a geografia literária de Teixeira de Pascoaes e a crise dos espaços em Portugal (1877-1928)

Abstract

This thesis aims to analyze the relationship between the Portuguese poet Teixeira de Pascoaes and the spaces that appear in his work, articulating it with a crisis that affected certain spaces in Portuguese society between the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century. My objective is to analyze the symbolic dimensions – images, meanings and values – built and touted by Teixeira de Pascoaes' literary discourse and how this discourse enunciates and builds the affectionate and nostalgic landscape of the house, the mountain, the villages, the cities. Contrary to studies that tend to reduce Pascoaes' work to an expression of Saudosismo, a literature of absence or a philosophy of saudade, I want to inaugurate another form of interpretation, and this is where the central thesis of this work is found: thinking the poetics of space in Pascoaes as a literature of resistance to a process of deterritorialization suffered by a large part of the population of Portugal in the highlighted period. Alongside traumatic events, social, political and economic destabilization, what I call the crisis of spaces emerged, that is, a break in the link between social groups and the land, the collective uprooting of the home place, a movement of estrangement and a loss of control over individual and collective territorialities, caused by times of crisis and by the advance of capitalist and bourgeois modernity. I cultivate the hypothesis that the figure of Pascoaes, together with his poetic geography, represents a desire to fight against this process, making exactly the opposite movement: the subject who returns to the village where he was born and to the Casa de Pascoaes, in ruins, to rebuild it and live there for the rest of your life, on the edge of the mountain.