Spontaneous Tendency to Depersonalization

 "What I am essentially - behind the involuntary masks of poet, logical reasoner and so forth - is a dramatist. My spontaneous tendency to depersonalization, which I mentioned in my last letter to explain the existence of my heteronyms, naturally leads to this definition. And so I do not evolve, I simply EVOLVE. (. . .) I continuously change personality, I keep enlarging (and here there is a kind of evolution) my capacity to create new characters, new forms of pretending that I understand the world or, more accurately, that the world can be understood."

(From a letter of Fernando Pessoa, 20 January 1935), A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe, p. 273

Since this upcoming semester may actually be my last one (doubtful, but who knows) I decided to keep a promise to myself and focus a class on Fernando Pessoa. I'm adapting my COR 204 Marxism & the Movies class and, while maintaining, largely, a film structure, I'm going to examine issues of self and identity, which I guess will make this a class on Self, Identity, & Film. I'm going to have the students read Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet and also the poetry collection, A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe. This will allow me to bring in films such as Bergman's Persona and Kurosawa's Ikiru and Kieslowski's Blue and Varda's Cleo from 5 to 7 and Ford's The Searchers. I'll probably bring in some choice selections from Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, because, well, why not? I think I'm going to, shadowing Pessoa, have the students write a factless autobiography. Somehow, this will all make sense.