As Mãos e o Espírito

Literary critic and professor, Óscar Lopes was born in Leça da Palmeira in 1917. He graduated in Classical Philology from the Faculty of Letters of Lisbon and attended the course in Historical-Philosophical Sciences in Coimbra and the Porto Conservatory of Music. Between 1951 and 1957 he promoted the literary page of... Porto TradeHe worked as a secondary school teacher until joining the faculty of the Faculty of Arts of Porto between 1974 and 1987, where he was a full professor and founded the Center for Linguistics, developing an essayistic activity that he always knew how to reconcile with his interest in music and linguistics. He was president of the Portuguese Writers' Association and an honorary member of the Association of Journalists and Men of Letters of Porto, and served on the juries of several literary prizes. Due to his involvement in the opposition to the Salazar regime, he was detained twice during the dictatorship, temporarily removed from official teaching service, and had his works seized, and was also repeatedly prevented from participating in congresses or other events to which he had been invited abroad. He belonged to the generation that, in the 1940s, in the pages of New Harvest or Vertex Defending a committed and theorized art based on the ideological coordinates of dialectical Marxism, the name of Óscar Lopes, alongside others such as Mário Dionísio, Mário Sacramento, Álvaro Cunhal, or Joaquim Namorado, is inseparable from the process that, integrating not only creation but also literary theorizing and criticism, will lead to the affirmation and progressive critical revision of the assumptions of neo-realism. Óscar Lopes' multifaceted training, specializing simultaneously in the fields of linguistics, musicology, history, philosophy, and literature, will allow him to complement the dialectical Marxist perspective, in what it demands of understanding the horizon of reality in which the literary text is inscribed, and enrich this overall vision through a detailed analysis of its stylistic characteristics. He moves pendulum-like between "microanalysis and grand syntheses" (cf. AA.VV. - The Meaning That Life Makes. Studies for Oscar Lopes, Porto, Campo das Letras, 1997, p. 16), the essay writing of Óscar Lopes, whether in large volumes of referential character in the field of literary historiography, such as the History of Portuguese Literature or Between Fialho and Nemésio , whether in studies on contemporary literature collected in Family Album or Time Figures"While on the one hand they stem from a vision attentive to the particularities of an author or a work, on the other hand they share an identical reflective breadth, remaining a place of epistemological questioning." (ibid., p. 16.) A sense of creative openness to new methods and models, which, within the scope of linguistic research, would culminate in innovative work, Symbolic Grammar of Portuguese , a pioneering work that constitutes a landmark in linguistic studies in Portugal. Having received multiple public tributes, on April 23, 1987, the Assembly of the Republic approved a Vote of Praise in recognition that his name "is an obligatory reference in contemporary Portuguese culture".
In 2000, the author received the Literary Life Award, granted by the Portuguese Writers' Association.