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Biography
Bernard McGuirk, MA (Glasgow), BPhil, DPhil (Oxon), Emeritus Professor of Romance Literatures and Literary Theory, formerly Director of the Postgraduate School of Critical Theory and Cultural Studies, recipient of the Inaugural Lord Dearing Award for Distinction in Learning and Teaching, University of Nottingham. From 1996 to 1998 President of the Association of Hispanists of Great Britain and Ireland, in 2002 he was created Commander of the Order of Merit, Portugal, is President of the International Consortium for the Study of Post-Conflict Societies and Honorary Fellow of the Institute of Modern Languages Research, University of London. He has taught at universities throughout Europe, Latin America and the United States, including the École Normale Supérieure in Paris and at the University of Oxford where he was Laming Research Fellow of The Queen's College. He has directed to completion some forty doctoral theses and continues to supervise candidates at postgraduate level. Professor McGuirk has devoted recent research to representations in literature and film of the Malvinas/Falklands conflict and to its aftermath, including the plight of veterans. He is writing a sequel to his twenty-fifth anniversary monograph Falklands/Malvinas: An Unfinished Business, titled It Breaks Two to Tangle: Political Cartoons of the Falklands-Malvinas War. His theoretical concerns have invoked the interface between post-structuralism and literary production and Jacques Derrida's notion of the animotin relation, for instance, to African literature in Portuguese and the "Black Atlantic". These projects form part of a broader interest in the literatures of war and post-conflict cultures, on which he has addressed meetings of the UK House of Lords, the Argentine Chamber of Deputies and Foreign Ministry Diplomat Training Programme as well as Embassies in Europe and Latin America. McGuirk's research has covered a range of nineteenth and twentieth century literatures in French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and English. In poetry, he has published on: Mallarmé, Apollinaire, Cendrars, Reverdy, Pessoa, Almada Negreiros, Darío, Alberti, Neruda, Vallejo, Haroldo de Campos, Thénon, Gómez Peña, Conran, Duffy; in fiction, on: Henry James, Colm Tóibín, Erri de Luca, Borges, Cortázar, Fogwill, Feiling, Gamerro, Andahazi, Fuentes, García Márquez, Guimarães Rosa, Agualusa, Tabucchi; in film, on such as María Luisa Bemberg, Miguel Pereira, Tristán Bauer, and on British cinema of the Thatcher years, including My Beautiful Laundrette, Priest and The Full Monty. He collaborated with French-Argentine director Nelly Kaplan for the British Film Institute Classics series volume on Abel Gance's Napoléon. His writing highlights the confrontation between theory, politics and literature throughout the Romance-speaking cultures, in an applied poststructuralist perspective. He has written on border theory and poetry and on translation theory and has translated the poetry of the Sem Terra/Landless Movement and its intellectual supporters such as Chico Buarque, Frei Beto and Haroldo de Campos. On the political cartoon, he has published on Steve Bell and subjected the burlesque of Berlusconi's re-torched Rome to Derrida's animotcity of an alternative ethics. He is writing a book on the status of literary studies in Latin America after the so-called "cultural turn". Debates on the continuing relevance of literary and critical theory and their relation with cultural studies continue to be addressed, in the line of his major monographs, edited and co-edited books: Latin American Literature: Symptoms, Risks and Strategies of Post-structuralist Criticism; Poesia de Guerra; Gabriel García Márquez: New Readings; Three Persons on One: a Centenary Tribute to Fernando Pessoa; ¿Qué es el modernismo? Nueva Encuesta, Nuevas Lecturas; Pierre Reverdy: 1889 1989; Redirections in Critical Theory; Inequality and Theory in Hispanic and Latin American Cultures; Brazil and the Discovery of America: Narrative, Fiction, History 1492-1992; Haroldo de Campos in Conversation: In Memoriam 1929-2003; Happiness and Post-Conflict; Landless Voices in Poetry and Song. The Movimento dos Sem Terra of Brazil. His latest monographs are Erasing Fernando Pessoa (2017) and Latin American Literature and Post-structuralism (2018).
Expertise Summary
Post-Structuralist Critical Theories; Comparative Literature; Post-Conflict Studies
Research Summary
McGuirk, Bernard (2018). Latin American Literature and Post-structuralism, London, Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies in the Humanities, 2018. 279pp. ISBN 9781912399048
McGuirk, Bernard (2018)."Re-Writing the Estado Novo: Antonio Tabucchi'sSostiene Pereira",
Bulletin of Spanish Studies, volume XCV Numbers 2-3, February-March 2018, pp.345-368. ISSN 1475-3820
McGuirk, Bernard (2017). Erasing Fernando Pessoa, London, Critical, Cultural and Communications Press, 2017, 129pp. ISBN 978-1-905510-52-8
McGuirk, Bernard (2017). "Trans-Memories of Heaven and Hell: Haroldo de Campos and 'the angel on the left of history'", Translation: a transdisciplinary journal,Issue 6, 2017, pp. 53-71. ISBN: 978-88-85622-04-3 ISSN 2240-0451
McGuirk, Bernard (2017). "Pessoa (e Derrida) sob rasura",Lisbon, Actas, Congresso Internacional Fernando Pessoa, pp.104-19. https://casafernandopessoa.pt/application/files/5315/1698/3454/CFP_ACTAS_2017.pdf
McGuirk, Bernard (2016)."Magnificat: Ecce animot. My soul doth magnify the [Word]. Fernando [in Felix] Pessoa", XVII Colóquio de Outono, Universidade do Minho, Edições Humus, 2016, pp.19-38. ISBN 978-989-755-222-9
McGuirk, Bernard (2016). "Construyendo y deconstruyendo puentes", Relatos de Malvinas.Paradojas en la representación e imaginario nacional, ed. Maria A. Semilla Durán, Buenos Aires, EDUVIM, 2016, pp. 79-95. ISBN 978-987-699-355-5
McGuirk, Bernard (2015). "Ah,", Porque eres, a la par, uno y diverso. Estudios literarios y teatrales en homenaje al profesor António Sánchez Trigueros, Granada, Editorial Universidad de Granada, pp.557-562. ISBN 978-84-338-5749-1
McGuirk, Bernard (2015). "BarthesSostiene Tabucchi. Imagen [Danza] Texto", Cien Años de Roland Barthes, Anthropos, Cuadernos de cultura crítica y conocimiento, volumen 242, 2015, pp. 77-96. ISSN 2385-5150
McGuirk, Bernard (2015)."TerrAfirmapereiraPoria Image [Dance] Text. Tabucchi d'après Barthes", XVI Colóquio de Outono, Universidade do Minho, Edições Humus, 2015, pp.37-56, XV Coloquio de Outono, Universidade do Minho, Edições Humus, 2015, pp.37-56. ISBN 978-989-8421-20-3
McGuirk, Bernard (2015). "MIMA-FATAXA. Cosmopolitan Symphony and Apology of the Feminine Triangle" (translation), We, the "Orpheu" Lot, Lisbon, Egeac, 2015, pp.75-80.ISBN 978-989-755-178-9
McGuirk, Bernard (2014)."De profundis clamavi. Desperately Seeking Silvio: From Banana Republicanism to Burlesque Risorgimento, XV Colóquio de Outono, Universidade do Minho, Edições Humus, 2014, pp.383-412. ISBN 978-989-755-075-1
McGuirk, Bernard (2013). "Engenharia/Bricolage Navegações. Ils ont changé ma chanson", Lisbon, Actas, Congresso Internacional Fernando Pessoa, pp.274-280. https://casafernandopessoa.pt/application/files/7915 /1698/4246/CFP_ACTAS_2013.pdf
McGuirk, Bernard (2013). "Envers et contre tout: Ova completa de Susana Thénon", in Mélusine, volume XXXIII, 'AutoreprésentationFéminine', Cahiers de L'Association pour l'Etude du Surréalisme, Éditions L'Age d'Homme, Paris, 2013, pp.194-205. ISSN 972-2-8251-4308-7