Event overview
James Randall (Goldsmiths): 'Life/Death Writing: The place of death in life writing and the role of the posthumous life in modern fiction, from Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet to José Saramago's The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis'
This paper takes two alternative approaches to death and narrative. The first half will look at life writing and how death can change how life stories are told, exploring ideas of writers including Walter Benjamin, Susan Sontag, Fernando Pessoa, John Berger and Maurice Blanchot. The second half will consider the compelling power of the 'posthumous life’ as narrated in modern fiction, following the words of the Brazilian author Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, whose best-known novel begins (in the opening paragraph): 'I am a deceased writer not in the sense of one who has written and is now deceased, but in the sense of one who has died and is now writing' (The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, 1880). Posthumous fictional ideas will be explored via José Saramago's The Year in the Death of Ricardo Reis (1984), in which two related poets (Pessoa and Reis, the latter a heteronym of Pessoa) are resurrected in 1930's Lisbon in the early years of fascist dictatorship.
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 21 Oct 2010 | 6:30pm - 8:00pm |
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