MORPHE – Text and Memory

Coord: Gerd Hammer
 

MORPHE researches memory in its relationship with tradition, emotions and textuality, aiming to contribute to the debate of how individual, collective and cultural identities are formed and transformed. It is organized into 5 research clusters working on specific topics: COMPARATIVE WORLD LITERATURE aims to develop the field of Word Literature in Portugal, based on the comparative perspective and the estrangement of reading, promoting a non-Eurocentric conception of European literatures; it hosts a subsidised project with the same title. ECHO: POETRY AND POETS OF THE CANCIONEIRO GERAL hosts a project with the same title and uses a comparative approach to study the only testimony of 15th-century Portuguese songbook poetry, aiming to improve its visibility in the late medieval and early modern Iberian context. POSTHUMAN: POSTHUMANIST LITERARY IMAGINATION explores the contribution of the post-humanist literary imagination to a critical awareness of the limits of traditional anthropocentric and humanistic assumptions, challenging boundaries between the human and the non-human, the self and the other, the organic and the technological; it hosts a project with the same title. AESTHETICS OF MEMORY AND EMOTIONS works on memory and emotions in literature and the arts from modernity to today, with a special focus on contemporary artistic representations of trauma and migration, and on the impact of the media and new technologies on the cultural dimensions of memory and emotion; it hosts the project OUT OF PLACE: EMOTIONS AND MEMORY. TEXTUALITIES and all its subprojects deal with Portuguese literature, having purposes such as: the study of the different literary forms of autobiographical literature; the study of Portuguese literary magazines.

Subgroups

Aesthetics of Memory and Emotions

Comparative World Literature

ECHO – Poetry and the Poets of Cancioneiro Geral

GENORE – Gender, Normativity, Representations

POSTHUMAN: Posthumanist Literary Imagination

Textualidades

FCT-funded Research Project:

A Literatura Colonial Portuguesa – Além Da Memória Do Império (2022.06543.PTDC)