A ground-breaking volume of comparative studies relating to José Saramago will be launched in Manchester, England on 10 May 2006. I myself have a contribution. I will be there myself and will of course report more!
Details: ‘In Dialogue with Saramago: Essays in Comparative Literature’ Edited by Adriana Alves de Paula Martins and Mark Sabine 2006: Manchester, University of Manchester, Manchester Spanish and Portuguese Studies Series Price: GBP 9.00 Available from: Dept of Spanish and Portuguese Studies, University of Manchester, M13 9PL, England ISBN: 0 9539968 8 3
The editors are very grateful to the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and the Fundação Luso- Americana para o Desenvolvimento for their financial support for the publication of this volume.
Launch: The launch will take place on Wednesday 10 May 2006 from 4 pm to 6 pm, in Room S.3.1 of the Humanities Building, Lime Grove, Manchester University. There will be a short address by Dr. Ana Paula Arnaut from the Portuguese Department of the University of Coimbra.
ToC:
Mark Sabine & Adriana Alves de Paula Martins, Introduction: Saramago and the politics of quotation; Ellen W. Sapega, Saramago’s ‘genius’: Camões, Adamastor, and Ricardo Reis; David Frier, Of false dons and missed opportunities, or how Calisto Elói and Ricardo Reis failed Portugal; Orlando Grossegesse, About words, tears, and screams: Dante’s Commedia revisited by Borges and Saramago; Helena Carvalhão Buescu, The encounter as failure to meet: Saramago’s Todos Os Nomes and Dostoevsky’s White Nights; Maria Irene Ramalho Santos, All the names: José Saramago and lyric poetry; Christopher Rollason, How totalitarianism begins at home: Saramago and George Orwell; José N. Ornelas, Convergences and divergences in Saramago’s Ensaio sobre a Cegueira and Camus’s The Plague; Mark Sabine, Levantado do Chão after One Hundred Years of Solitude: the telling of time and truth in Saramago and García Márquez; Adriana Alves de Paula Martins, The poetics of correction in Gore Vidal’s Burr and Saramago’s História do Cerco de Lisboa; Paulo de Medeiros, Saramago and Grass
**Note added 14 October 2009: My own essay, on Saramago and Orwell (pp. 105-120), has been placed on the reading list for the course ‘Descobrir Saramago’ (‘Discovering Saramago’) to be offered from 2 to 6 November 2009 to secondary school teachers of Portuguese, organised by the Centro de Formação da Associação de Escolas de São Miguel e Santa Maria (Azores, Portugal) – see entry on this blog for 13 October 2009
**Note added 8 September 2010: the same essay is now also quoted and linked to in the English-language Wikipedia entry on José Saramago: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jos%C3%A9_Saramago,
and in a piece on Saramago by the Irish novelist William Wall:
http://threemonkeysonline.com/book_blog/2010/novels/jose-saramago-an-appreciation
(Three Monkeys Online – book blog – 31 August 2010) – "José Saramago – an appreciation"
(see entry for 8 September 2010).
**
Both José Ornelas’ chapter and my own are cited in:
Krista Brune (University of California, Berkeley), The Essayistic Touch: Saramago’s Version of Blindness and Lucidity – Mester (Dept of Spanish and Portuguese, University of Los Angeles), 39(1), 2010,89-110 –
http://escholarship.org/uc/item/8tt3p7fm
My chapter is on-line at: http://yatrarollason.info/files/SaramagoandOrwell.pdf