Camoniana

Retomando as atividades do blog

First week of the Master's classes and I'm already late on all the readings.

In other news, today is Hug A Medievalist Day. You can hug me now.

So my Master's classes start on April's Fools

If reproduction was the key to patriarchy for some, sexuality itself was the answer for others. Catherine McKinnon's bold formulations were at once her own and characteristic of a certain approach: "Sexuality is to feminism what work is to marxism: that which is most one's own, yet most taken away." "Sexual objectification is the primary process of the subjection of women. It unites act with word, construction with expression, perception with enforcement, myth with reality. Man fucks woman; subject verb object."

Had Camões chosen to limit the tone and scope of his epic to the strictly military and religious aspects of chivalry, Os Lusiadas might well have emerged as a poem totally lacking in references to womanhood. But the fact that he wrote under the powerful spell of Renaissance humanism required him to pay his courtier's debt to the current concept of love as a highly formalized standard for measuring human conduct. (...) and Camões could no more have omitted this theme from his poem than he could have neglected to turn to Vergil's Aeneid as the model of the Renaissance epic. In short, Camoes, like Spencer, strove in his poetry to join his humanistic learning to the chivalric ideal of perfect manhood "fused with female grace."

I finished it.

It's on!

(...) I can see a young historian at the subway or at a Luxembourg street bank. He just bought, with the money of two sandwiches, The Identity of France. Starving, he devours Braudel's introduction (...)