Perguntam-me não raras vezes:
- "Qual o livro de José Saramago que mais gostaste de ler?"
A resposta que pode ser dada a cada momento:
- "Impossível de dizer... não sei responder, não seria justo para com outros (livros) não nomeados. Mas uma coisa sempre soube. Uma obra de Saramago, enquanto "pseudo ser vivo" ou com "gente dentro" tem que me raptar, prender-me, não me deixar sair de dentro das suas páginas. Fazer de mim um refém, e só me libertar no final da leitura... mesmo ao chegar à última página. Aí, o "Eu" leitor que se mantém refém, liberta-se da "gente que a obra transporta dentro" e segue o seu caminho.
Mas segue um caminho que se faz caminhando, conjuntamente com mais uma família"

Rui Santos

terça-feira, 13 de setembro de 2016

Serviço Educativo 2016-2017 - Fundação José Saramago

Apresentação de programa de actividades para o ano lectivo que se inicia.
Pode ser consultado e descarregado, aqui
em http://www.josesaramago.org/servico-educativo-2016-2017/

"A Fundação José Saramago apresenta o programa do seu serviço educativo para o ano lectivo 2016-2017, que inclui propostas para a comunidade educativa, para famílias e para o público em geral em áreas que vão da promoção da leitura ao teatro e à performance.

No programa que agora se apresenta, destaque para a oferta que cobre os vários ciclos de ensino com propostas que nascem da obra de José Saramago. Como se lê na nota breve que apresenta estes ateliers: «Acreditamos que dar a ler é nossa missão. Por isso os ateliers alicerçam-se numa mesma estratégia: a da leitura colectiva e do diálogo crítico. Para cada ciclo novo desafio, que se erige sobre a base de leitura anterior.»

Para além da oferta para a comunidade educativa, o serviço educativo da FJS integra duas exposições itinerantes, de cedência gratuita para bibliotecas e escolas, para além de uma formação para professores e de propostas que nascem de grupos de teatro e que permitem um contacto com livros em particular ou com o conjunto da obra saramaguiana.

A todos os que connosco colaboram neste programa do serviço educativo, formadores, actores, professores, alunos, o nosso obrigado!"

No link da página da FJS, pode ser descarregado em pdf o programa e que aqui se reporta o índice do mesmo.

Índice
Ateliers de Promoção da Leitura (APL), formação para professores e comunidade de leitores:
- A Maior Flor do Mundo (1.º Ciclo - 4.º Ano) Pág. 5
- O Silêncio da Água (2.º Ciclo - 5.º e 6.º Anos) Pág. 6
- O Lagarto (3.º Ciclo - 7.º, 8.º e 9.º Anos) Pág. 7
- 1.as Páginas (Secundário - 10.º e 11.º Anos) Pág. 8
- José Saramago: tecer leituras para a sala de aula (Formação para Professores) Pág. 9
- Ler Saramago (Comunidade de Leitores) Pág. 11

Para famílias:
- Peddy-paper Pág. 13
- A maior ideia do mundo, Oficina por André Letria Pág. 14
Visitas guiadas à Fundação José Saramago/Casa dos Bicos: Pág. 15

Exposições itinerantes:
- José Saramago, 90 Anos Pág. 17
- A Maior Flor do Mundo Pág. 19

Peças de teatro / Performances:
- Memorial do Convento Pág. 21
- Quem quer ser Saramago? Pág. 22
- Levantei-me do Chão Pág. 23

"The Double" critica literária - "O Homem Duplicado"

A presente critica literária pode ser recuperada e consultada, aqui
em https://scholarsandrogues.com/2016/09/11/jose-saramago-our-doppelgangers-our-selves/

The Double is, ultimately, a meditation – on who we are and, more importantly, on why we are.

“Chaos is merely order waiting to be deciphered.” ― José Saramago, The Double

"The Double" by Jose Saramago

"The use of doppelgangers in literature is a common enough  device. Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “William Wilson” and Joseph Conrad’s “The Secret Sharer” explore the idea of a double who shares an intimate relationship with the protagonist.  In novel form Dickens treats the idea in A Tale of Two Cities and Dostoevsky explores it in The Double. Of course the device has been given permutations, the most famous of which is likely Robert Louis Stevenson‘s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde wherein the doppelganger idea is blended with an exploration of chemically induced multiple personality disorder.

The Portuguese Nobelist Jose Saramago (whose Baltasar and Blimunda I wrote about last year) offers a postmodern spin on the doppelganger. Saramago’s The Double is both a story of a man who accidentally encounters his human duplicate while watching a video and a meditation on identity, self-hood, and the power of language.

Tertuliano Maximo Afonso is a history teacher. He is divorced, depressed, and at loose ends in both his professional and personal lives. A well meaning friend, a mathematics teacher, recommends a film to him – as a diversion from his worries. The film, The Race is to the Swift, has a scene with a hotel receptionist that Afonso realizes is his exact twin. Afonso becomes obsessed with finding the actor. He watches a series of movies from the same production company trying to find out the name of his doppelganger. Finally, by chance, he finds the name and contact the actor (who uses the stage name Daniel Santa-Clara but whose real name is Antonio Claro). Through a long, overly discursive, narrative  Saramago finally brings Claro and Afonso together.  Their meeting sets in motion a series of events that ends in what can properly be called absurdist tragedy.

What Saramago is interested in in this novel is not this story. What he is really interested in is the vagaries of the imagination and the  power of words not simply to describe but to define existence:

We have an odd relationship with words. We learn a few when we are small, throughout our lives we collect others through education, conversation, our contact with books, and yet, in comparison, there are only a tiny number about whose meaning, sense, and denotation we would have absolutely no doubts, if one day, we were to ask ourselves seriously what they meant. Thus we affirm and deny, thus we convince and are convinced, thus we argue, deduce, and conclude, wandering fearlessly over the surface of concepts about which we only have the vaguest of ideas, and, despite the false air of confidence that we generally affect as we feel our way along the road in verbal darkness, we manage, more or less, to understand each other and even, sometimes, to find each other.

As for imagination, Saramago tries to explain what happens to our imaginations as we move through life following predetermined paths, adhering to the behaviors that prevent us from experiencing life’s possibilities:

We all know, however, that the enormous weight of tradition, habit, and custom that occupies the greater part of our brain bears down pitilessly on the more brilliant and innovative ideas of which the remaining part is capable, and although it is true that, in some cases, this weight can balance the excesses and extravagances of the imagination that would lead us God knows where were they given free rein, it is equally true that it often has a way of subtly submitting what we believed to be our free will to unconscious tropisms, like a plant that does not know why it will always have to lean toward the side from which the light comes.

The idea that we are not unique – that there is a duplicate of us somewhere – is antithetical to our notions of our – let me use a term that has been thrown around a lot in recent years – exceptionalism. Saramago suggests, however, something else: that no matter how many duplicates of us there are that we are, to those who love us, unique:

It was said that one of them, either the actor or the history teacher, was superfluous in this world, but you weren’t, you weren’t superfluous, there is no duplicate of you to come and replace you at your mother’s side, you were unique, just as every ordinary person is unique, truly unique.

The Double is, ultimately, a meditation – on who we are and, more importantly, on why we are."