Ciranda de Pedra: Manifestations of the Living Statue in Portuguese-language Literatures

Abstract

Among the studies of Portuguese-language literature dealing with simulacrum, there is still a lack of diachronic perspective on the issues associated with its many possible representations. This incipient study of ours started from the need to verify how literature outlines figures of the simulacrum in peripheral, contaminated and hybridized cultural areas such as those of the Portuguese-speaking world, and what role it attributes to them in relation to the sphere of the human. In order to answer these questions, however partially, we have focused our research on one of the possible conceptions of the simulacrum – the statue – and we have tried, in Portuguese-language literature (from Europe, America and Africa), to identify, for each era (classical, romanticism, modernism and post-modernism), texts that reformulate the theme: Camões, Melo, Carvalhal, Sá-Carneiro, Clarice Lispector, Pepetela, and Jaime Salazar Sampaio are some authors examined in this initial journey among the living stones.

Keywords

• Lusophone literature
• Living statue
• Simulacrum