Contemporary Portugal: Literature and Society

On completion of the course students will be able to:

• account for the decisive historical events (political and socioeconomic) that have shaped the development of Portuguese society from the 1900s until today
• reflect upon the development of Portuguese society from a global perspective, and include gender and postcolonial perspectives in analyses.
• conduct literary analyses that problematise the literary content and relates to its historical and socio-cultural context
• search for, collect, interpret and compile relevant information in students‘ own spoken and written Portuguese.

The course contains the study of works of fiction and non-fiction, film adaptations and other contemporary material that sheds light on developments in Portuguese society from the beginning of the 1900s to the present day. We will focus on the close study of a selection of representative works of fiction whose content is related to important historical and sociopolitical phenomenons, such as monarchy, republic, colonial power, dictatorship, democracy and membership of the EU. We also discuss developments in society from the perspective of a number of issues from postcolonial and gender theory. Students get further training in language proficiency by focusing on reading works of fiction and presenting their analyses orally and in writing.

• Written assignments
• Oral presentations of written material
• Active participation in seminars

Lectures, seminars and group work. The language of instruction is Portuguese.

The Swedish grades U–VG.

• Assignments, Presentations, Seminars - 7.5 cr

Replaces course code PR1013.