“What can I picture us with virtue?” Imaginary facts in new Portuguese letters

Abstract

This article aims to analyze the work New Portuguese Letters (1974) by Maria Velho da Costa, Maria Isabela Barreno and Maria Teresa Horta, whose proposal for rewriting the Portuguese Letters by Mariana Alcoforado seems to go through date and contextualization of the end of the dictatorial period in Portugal, positioning itself as a poetics of the imaginary, challenging the effects of discourse in the world and problematizing the implications of the world in our production of images. It is a proposal for reading this kind of epistolary work, in which the structure of correspondence, interviews, for example, in the gesture of addressing, ends up working with figurations of the feminine and of the women, which are destroyed and deconstructed soon after be assigned, destined or named in the letters. In this sense, both the performative use of language and the poetic genre are considered constituents of these New Letters, which do not cease to hold the reader to the word, to the scream and to the song, also forcing the authors to listen to themselves, in a movement of demand and of dispossession.