Ana Rita G. Soares (Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain) presents on the 11st of June and on the 12th of July two guided book-club sessions on Iberian medievalist fiction . Inviting students to share their own ideas, this sessions will be focused on non-normative figurations of the Middle Ages in two short stories: Paloma Díaz-Mas’ El rapto del Santo Grial and Herberto Helder’s Teorema. Both Paloma Díaz-Mas and Herberto Helder’s short stories are presented as rehearsing familiar myths and stories – on the one hand the Arthurian cycle and the Holy Grail, and on the other hand the Pedro and Inês myth – in order to advance alternative versions of the known (hi)story. This book sessions will pay particular attention to how chronological narrative emplotment of conventional historiography is bent and even broken, as the two stories court a postmodern penchant for anachronism, non-linearity, irony, pastiche and “strangeness” that refuses to understand past and present as discrete and distinct.
The texts will be available in advance in Portuguese and Spanish to everyone interested.
Please send an email to anaritag@ucm.es