Special Issue: Fernando Pessoa in a digital context
Special Issue: Fernando Pessoa in a digital context
Between October 2023 and April 2024, a series of online seminars titled "Pessoa 3.0" took place (https://pessoa3ponto0.wordpress.com/) at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the University of Coimbra. The meetings addressed topics that go beyond those traditionally investigated in Pessoa studies, within a digital context. For example, the representation of the writer's texts in digital format has facilitated access to a diverse archive while simultaneously enabling the reading of the work from other interpretative paradigms. The specificity of Pessoa's work raises a series of technical problems, sometimes hardly representable (diversity, fragmentation, heteronomy), and, in turn, the concept of archive and digital can help rethink Pessoa's work.
Technology affects creation and originality in art and literature. Fernando Pessoa's work, in the transition from modernity to postmodernity, can be understood through the readerly assimilation of a set of works and authors from which the writer nourished his creative process. In recent years, we have seen how artificial intelligence can generate texts from other texts and imitating styles. Thus, we can ask ourselves how to rethink Pessoa's work in the post-human context and from AI, and to what extent modernist creative processes anticipate AI and algorithmic writing.
Similarly, social networks and cinema have recently popularized the term "multiverse", understood as multiple parallel realities in which different possibilities of choice occur simultaneously. In philosophy, the idea of possible worlds, or counterfactuals, dates back from modern logic to Wittgenstein's Tractatus. What implications does this context have on the notion of reality and truth? From this point, it is possible to study Pessoa's work as multiple parallel realities. Could the notion of creation be equated with the combination in the face of the multiplicity of possibilities of choice?
These and other topics, such as performance, post-truth, and electronic literature, were the starting point for rethinking the work of the Portuguese writer and for thinking the contemporaneity from the author's perspective. The call for this issue collects this initiative and invites submissions of texts that approach the work of Fernando Pessoa from contemporaneity or texts that explore contemporaneity starting from the writer's work.
See some topics of interest for the call:
Pessoa and Digital Archives.
Pessoa and Artificial Intelligence.
Pessoa and Contemporary Writing Practices.
Pessoa and the Multiverse.
Pessoa and Post-truth.
Pessoa and Electronic Literature.
Guest Editor
Diego Giménez (Centre for Portuguese Literature - Faculty of Arts and Humanities, University of Coimbra)
Submissions open until August 15, 2024. Accepted languages: Portuguese, Spanish, English, Catalan, and French.
Publication date of the edition: December 2024.
Depending on the volume of submissions and the availability of reviewers, the dossier may be divided into two parts, with the second one published in July 2025.
