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Speaker:
Humberto Brito holds a PhD in literary theory (U Lisboa, 2007). He is a post-doctoral fellow of the Philosophy of Language Institute (U Nova Lisboa), on a project on philosophy and literature, and a member of the Laboratório de Estudos Literários Avançados at the same university. He is a visiting scholar at �鶹���� in the Department of Iberian and Latin American Cultures. His interests include Portuguese modernism, Poetics and Philosophy of Art.

Abstract:
This lecture shall discuss Fernando Pessoa’s heteronymic venture as an attempt to elude or at least to control “Decadence” –– the “total loss of unconsciousness” resulting from one’s search for originality. Becoming aware of Decadence signals a turn in one’s life as a reader and thenceforth, Pessoa suggests, reading becomes a “slavish sort of dreaming”. “If I must dream, why not my own dreams?” was Pessoa’s personal declaration of war against it, forecasting his own turn to a mature reader around 1914 or so, the year he presumably met his “Master Caeiro”. Alberto Caeiro (“he who whitewashes all”) and his pagan discipleship put forth a reaction against Decadence, daring to perform a sort of rectification of Life. Yet the neopagans’ cultural description of Decadence as a “degeneracy of ideas” at the same time depicts their Master –– the “Great Vaccine” –– as an inspiration fading away, suggesting that the cure for Decadence, alas, is more Decadence.