the Romance core
What is French literature?
French literature is not merely a body of texts, but a living tradition of aesthetic ambition and intellectual audacity—a space where beauty and thought collide to redefine both society and the self, at the very core of European identity. To speak of French literature is to enter a conversation across centuries—between Molière and Camus, Racine and Duras—where each generation reimagines what it means to write, to feel, and to rebel.
How do I contribute to this area?
Primarily, I've been trained in Romance philology; French language and literature accross the centuries was my major, although I always tended to transgress the frontiers of France to a global horizon. Obviously, there is a reason to do so: France d'outre mer started even earlier than the Portuguese navigation, if we count crux transmarina, the concept of Crusade that led the Provencal poetical spirit to the Levant and launched the foundadion of what would become the famous littérature-monde of Glissant.
As a scholar, I've spend two important years in France. In 2016-2017, I worked in the Centre for Renaissance Studies in Tours, and in 2020-2021, I was a fellow-in-residence in Neuville-sur-Oise, in the outskirts of the Parisisan metropolitan area. My main focus is on the complexity of relations between France and the Islamic Mediterranean, starting from Middle Ages and early-modern period. Obviously, it is a thread of intellectual history that leads stright to our times and the transcultural identity of the present-day French society.
On the other hand, I also wrote about French literature, with such classics as Verlaine, Flaubert, Zola, Villiers de L'Isle-Adam, and others. I have been active in the 19th-century studies quite a lot, and in quite a natural, instinctive way, as it simply forms the background of whatever the European literatures are today. France shaped Europe very profoundly. The echoes of its brilliant culture are to be read in Portugal, and on the opposite ed of the continent, in Poland, Russia, Armenia... On the other hand, 19th century is of course crucial for more than just Europe, since it is the epoch in which modernity takes shape also for the rest of the world, with colonial empires, transcolonial movements, and various revivals all over the world. France is everywhere, in Africa, in the Caribbean, and in Brazil.
French literature is not merely a body of texts, but a living tradition of aesthetic ambition and intellectual audacity—a space where beauty and thought collide to redefine both society and the self, at the very core of European identity. To speak of French literature is to enter a conversation across centuries—between Molière and Camus, Racine and Duras—where each generation reimagines what it means to write, to feel, and to rebel.
How do I contribute to this area?
Primarily, I've been trained in Romance philology; French language and literature accross the centuries was my major, although I always tended to transgress the frontiers of France to a global horizon. Obviously, there is a reason to do so: France d'outre mer started even earlier than the Portuguese navigation, if we count crux transmarina, the concept of Crusade that led the Provencal poetical spirit to the Levant and launched the foundadion of what would become the famous littérature-monde of Glissant.
As a scholar, I've spend two important years in France. In 2016-2017, I worked in the Centre for Renaissance Studies in Tours, and in 2020-2021, I was a fellow-in-residence in Neuville-sur-Oise, in the outskirts of the Parisisan metropolitan area. My main focus is on the complexity of relations between France and the Islamic Mediterranean, starting from Middle Ages and early-modern period. Obviously, it is a thread of intellectual history that leads stright to our times and the transcultural identity of the present-day French society.
On the other hand, I also wrote about French literature, with such classics as Verlaine, Flaubert, Zola, Villiers de L'Isle-Adam, and others. I have been active in the 19th-century studies quite a lot, and in quite a natural, instinctive way, as it simply forms the background of whatever the European literatures are today. France shaped Europe very profoundly. The echoes of its brilliant culture are to be read in Portugal, and on the opposite ed of the continent, in Poland, Russia, Armenia... On the other hand, 19th century is of course crucial for more than just Europe, since it is the epoch in which modernity takes shape also for the rest of the world, with colonial empires, transcolonial movements, and various revivals all over the world. France is everywhere, in Africa, in the Caribbean, and in Brazil.
ongoing research
Invisible maritime horizons: between Raga, by Le Clézio, and Ni-Vanuatu literature
[in progress: end August 2025]
A recent call for papers in an Indian journal (JCLA), speaking of the underestimated and underexplored French contributions to Blue Humanities, made me revisit Le Clézio's old text, Raga. Approche du continent invisible (2006). This strange book, mixing fiction and quasi-documentalist narration, speaks of independence, and the valorization of women's work, the art weaving pandan mats. Raga is classified as a diary of a travel to Île de Pentecôte, on of the 83 islands forming the volcanic archipelago of Vanuatu. The book's initial sections present, so to speak, two overlapping spheres of exploration, one of the Western navigation that started with the Portuguese and the Spanish, and on the other hand, the much greater, even if lesser known adventure of the Melanesian people travelling in search of new lands of peace and abundance.
A recent call for papers in an Indian journal (JCLA), speaking of the underestimated and underexplored French contributions to Blue Humanities, made me revisit Le Clézio's old text, Raga. Approche du continent invisible (2006). This strange book, mixing fiction and quasi-documentalist narration, speaks of independence, and the valorization of women's work, the art weaving pandan mats. Raga is classified as a diary of a travel to Île de Pentecôte, on of the 83 islands forming the volcanic archipelago of Vanuatu. The book's initial sections present, so to speak, two overlapping spheres of exploration, one of the Western navigation that started with the Portuguese and the Spanish, and on the other hand, the much greater, even if lesser known adventure of the Melanesian people travelling in search of new lands of peace and abundance.
White. The scopic regime of exposition between Olympia and Au Bonheur des Dames
[in progress]
Une blancheur éclatante, lumineuse, nuptiale, gynocentrique. Une blancheur réinventée, dont la valeur traditionnelle de la pureté virginale s'efface pour donner lieu à l'érotisme. L'exploration transmodale entre l'art et la littérature a donné deux chefs-d’œuvre : Olympia et Au Bonheur des Dames avec son apothéose finale – l'exposition des articles blancs, la célébration d'une féminité triomphante et en même temps une transposition commerciale de l'essor visuel de la nouvelle peinture. Entre l’œuvre du peintre et celui de l'écrivain, il y a donc un point d'intersection : leur fascination pour la blancheur.
Une blancheur éclatante, lumineuse, nuptiale, gynocentrique. Une blancheur réinventée, dont la valeur traditionnelle de la pureté virginale s'efface pour donner lieu à l'érotisme. L'exploration transmodale entre l'art et la littérature a donné deux chefs-d’œuvre : Olympia et Au Bonheur des Dames avec son apothéose finale – l'exposition des articles blancs, la célébration d'une féminité triomphante et en même temps une transposition commerciale de l'essor visuel de la nouvelle peinture. Entre l’œuvre du peintre et celui de l'écrivain, il y a donc un point d'intersection : leur fascination pour la blancheur.
selected essays in French literature
Des Lettres de la religieuse portugaise aux Nouvelles Lettres portugaises : la conquête de la solitude à l'aube de l'âge moderne et son palimpseste féministe
From the Letters of a Portuguese Nun to New Portuguese Letters: the conquest of solitude at the dawn of the modern age and its feminist palimpsest
Colloquia Comparativa Litterarum, vol. 6, no 1/2020, p. 44-58. ISSN 2367-7716
ejournal.uni-sofia.bg/index.php/Colloquia/article/view/115
Intertextual relation between the Letters of a Portuguese Nun attributed to Guilleragues and New Portuguese Letters written by Maria Isabel Barreno, Maria Velho da Costa and Maria Teresa Horta is analysed as an adaptation to the changing cultural conditions of the epoch. In the 17th-century version, the female figure goes through a process of egotistic revitalisation. The disaster of a love relationship, just like a shipwreck in the essay of Hans Blumenberg, leads to radical individualisation and a conquest of solitude, a process that characterises the dawn of the modern age. To the contrary, the adaptation of the same literary figure by the Portuguese feminist writers appears as a reaction against the female solitude at the end of modernity. It is rather a “we” that is revitalised as a new experience of a couple or a community inhabiting a Utopian “house of females”.
Colloquia Comparativa Litterarum, vol. 6, no 1/2020, p. 44-58. ISSN 2367-7716
ejournal.uni-sofia.bg/index.php/Colloquia/article/view/115
Intertextual relation between the Letters of a Portuguese Nun attributed to Guilleragues and New Portuguese Letters written by Maria Isabel Barreno, Maria Velho da Costa and Maria Teresa Horta is analysed as an adaptation to the changing cultural conditions of the epoch. In the 17th-century version, the female figure goes through a process of egotistic revitalisation. The disaster of a love relationship, just like a shipwreck in the essay of Hans Blumenberg, leads to radical individualisation and a conquest of solitude, a process that characterises the dawn of the modern age. To the contrary, the adaptation of the same literary figure by the Portuguese feminist writers appears as a reaction against the female solitude at the end of modernity. It is rather a “we” that is revitalised as a new experience of a couple or a community inhabiting a Utopian “house of females”.
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L’acte de l’écriture partagé, dont les Nouvelles Lettres portugaises sont le résultat, constitue une situation affective opposée à la confrontation avec le vide. Marianne reste isolée dans son univers de souffrance amoureuse ; les religieuses charitables de son couvent ne peuvent pas l’aider – tout au plus elles peuvent la ramener dans sa chambre, où elle plonge dans un état situé au-delà de toute solidarité et de toute communication. Les trois féministes portugaises échangent leur lettres. Barreno, Horta et Velho da Costa n'explorent pas la voix individuelle et en processus d'individuation, comme c'était le cas dans les Lettres portugaises primitives, mais se proposent, par contre, de redonner la voix à toutes les femmes réduites au silence dans la société patriarcale. La légitimité d'une telle opération discursive est basée sur l’hypothèse d'une participation profonde dans le même destin, le même naufrage collectif où les femmes n'espèrent plus d'être sauvées seulement à titre d'exception. Elles ne recherchent ni acceptent qu'une solution systémique. Ce qui est aussi une transgression délibérée, elles refusent de signer leur lettres et pour autant, de reconnaître la valeur de l'instance d'auteur entendue en termes typiquement modernes. Leur détermination à contester la figure d'auteur comme individu est devenue bien visible au Tribunal de Boa-Hora, au cours de la persécution judiciaire intenté contre les trois féministes par le régime salazarien.
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Beyond the pity. Shipwreck with Spectator by Hans Blumenberg as a key to read Gilleragues and Flaubert
“Au-delà de la pitié. Guilleragues et Flaubert lus à la lumière de l'essai Naufrage avec spectateur d'Hans Blumenberg”, Auteur, personnage, lecteur dans les lettres d'expression française, Marzena Chrobak, Jakub Kornhauser, Waclaw Rapak (éd.), Kraków, Księgarnia Akademicka, 2014, p. 249-256. ISBN 978-83-7638-420-7
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“Une traduction qui fait un manifeste. Art poétique de Verlaine et Sztuka poetycka de Miriam” [“A translation that makes a manifesto. Art poétique by Verlaine et Sztuka poetycka by Miriam”], Romanica Silesiana, no 12/2017, p. 270-277. ISSN 1898-2433 (print); 2353-9887 (electronic).
The Polish translation of Verlaine's Art poétique marks an important step in the process of acquisition of the symbolism as a new paradigm of poetic creation. The analysis presented in this paper puts in the limelight the problem of positioning the translated text in the receptive literary system. The analytic proposal implies the employment of the term “embeddedness” originally introduced by the historian Karl Polanyi to render the implication of the non-economic factors in the process of production. Analogically, the production of the literary texts is conditioned by factors situated at the frontier of literature. Those wishing to adopt a foreign aesthetics must vanquish the resistance of the local, traditionalist context. As the result, the translation is “embedded” as a manifesto, even if Verlaine's Art poétique is a parody of the genre and an expression of the poet's creative doubts rather than a truly prescriptive text. The auto-parodic dimension of the original poem disappears in the Polish translation by Miriam that becomes a rigorous ars poetica. "L'amour non-humain de « l'andréide » au metadesign. En lisant L'Ève future de Villiers de l'Isle-Adam dans une perspective actuelle" ["Non-human love from andréide to metadesign. Reading Tomorrow's Eve by Villiers de l'Isle-Adam in a contemporary perspective"], Savoirs et fiction dans les littératures romanes, Barbara Marczuk, Joanna Gorecka-Kalita, Agnieszka Kocik (éd.), Kraków, Collegium Columbinum, 2014, p. 235-245. ISSN 1895-6076, ISBN 978-83-7624-128-9
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