Régio and Education

Synonyms

José Régio; Sensitivity; Telemachus’ complex; Melancholia; the Wound; Leidensgeschichte

Introduction

With the publication of the magazine presença (presence, not capitalized) in 1927, José Régio (1901–1969), together with a group of fellow young writers, began the dissemination of a cultural movement that was to become known as presencism, the chief literary tendency in Portugal during the 1930s.

Régio and his generation strove to confront the insufficiencies of rationalism, positivism, and scientism, launching a reaction against their prevalence in Portuguese cultural life since the Republic instauration in 1910.

To the presencistas(presencists), reason or science could not create inspired art, and, while they were tools for understanding the world and man’s place in it, they were by no means the only ones. Thus, the movement departed from realism and naturalism while eschewing the experimentalism of the modernists, instead embracing the more profound and comprehensive...