Editorial - Anabela Fernandes

Camões and the humanities in a digitalized society

How does the experience of reading the work of Camões and the production of knowledge fit together in a digitalized society, where multiform data is part of the "macroscopic study of cultural history", as Franco Moretti put it?

The various texts on the work and the author himself that have marked the commemorations of the 5th centenary of the birth of Luís de Camões indicate re-readings in which the prefix 're-' anticipates the possibility of successive metamorphoses as only classical texts can create: using Italo Calvino's axiom in Why Read the Classics, "A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it had to say." The temporality of a classic work therefore tends to rise up against the forgetting and concealment of transmitted experience (Walter Benjamin's Erfahrung), whose imagined discursive construction is woven through semantic nuances, filtered by subsequent experiences and knowledge.

The experience of reading a poem like Os Lusíadas makes it possible to discover extraordinary verses about understanding the world. In the long conversation we witness between the poetic subject and King Sebastião, the dedicatee of the poem, the heroes and heroines are defined by the greatness they can overcome, but also by the limits of their vulnerabilities. Camões' epic poem is anchored in a situational demonstrative field (demonstratio ad oculos, according to Karl Bühler) - "And yet, let's see what happens" (VII, 15) - with the enunciator trying to convince his interlocutors (the king, in the poem, and the readers of the text) of his message; in other words, the discourse becomes an instrument of action and a form of behavior. If we accept the concomitance of celebration and human ambiguity in this work, in the subjective enunciation of the Poet, we highlight the appreciation of the arts at the end of Canto V and resumed in Canto VII. The arts have the power to immortalize reality, so human experience is worthless if its memory is not materialized in artistic expression.

The reconfiguration of social interaction practices through digital networks has significant effects on the humanities. What place does imagination, understood as a repertoire of the potential of the hypothetical, occupy in the multimodal communication of the digital interface?

Returning to Italo Calvino's fourth lesson, Visibility, in Six proposals for the next millennium, a pedagogy of the 'iconic' imagination could enhance the recognition of aspects that are at the genesis of classical texts: "direct observation of the real world, phantasmatic and oneiric transfiguration, the figurative world transmitted by culture at its various levels, and a process of abstraction, condensation and internalization of the experience of the sensible, of decisive importance in visualization as in the verbalization of thought." (2006 [1990]: 114-115).

Since memory is always conjugated in the present, and its perception is irreducibly singular, it is in the rediscovery of the intentionality of the message - "Pera porem as cousas em memoria/ Que merecerem ter eterna glória!" (VII, 82) - that interpretation takes on an intersubjective performative dimension in perpetuum mobile. From this conversation between readers and the work of Camões, situated in a specific time and space, emerges what is most profound in cultural practices: the discernment of exophoric nexuses in which we see ourselves or from which we distance ourselves, which needs time so that we don't turn into lotophagi.

Anabela Fernandes, Researcher at CEIS20, Co-coordinator of Research Group 7 - Digital Humanities and Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Letters of the University of Coimbra.