Jorge Costa Lopes - Óscar Lopes - A Crítica do Livro

The problematic realism of "The Critique of the Book" and its author marked one of the most significant periods in 20th-century Portuguese criticism in general, and in neo-realism in particular. In truth, Óscar Lopes's thought and essays cannot be confined to a simple, Manichean orthodox vision, nor to the mere development and deepening of an ideological criterion committed to a Marxist aesthetic. Because, as Eduardo Lourenço fearlessly notes, "the critical case, to speak only of this aspect, of Óscar Lopes is more complex; his discourse as a literary historian, essayist, and even cultural scholar, cannot be inscribed, except with infinite reservations, in a simplistic scheme of Marxist content."

Óscar Lopes was born on October 2, 1917, in Leça da Palmeira, Matosinhos. He held degrees in Classical Philology from the Faculty of Letters of Lisbon and in Historical-Philosophical Sciences from the Faculty of Letters of Coimbra. He was a secondary school teacher from 1941 to 1974, and after the 25th of April (1974), he was appointed President of the Governing and Pedagogical Council of the Faculty of Letters of the University of Porto. Until his retirement in 1987, he was a member of the teaching staff of this Faculty as a professor of Linguistics.

He published an extensive bibliography of literary and linguistic studies, among which stand out: *História da Literatura Portuguesa* (1955), in collaboration with António José Saraiva, *Gramática Simbólica do Português - um Esboço* (1971), *Ler e Depois - Crítica e Interpretação Literária 1* (1969), *Modo de Ler - Crítica e Interpretação Literária 2* (1969), *Os Sinais e os Sentidos - Literatura Portuguesa do Século XX* (1986), *Entre Fialho e Nemésio* (1987), *Cifras do Tempo* (1990) and *A Busca de Sentido - Questões de Literatura Portuguesa* (1994). He received the Jacinto do Prado Coelho Prize (1984), the P.E.N. Clube Português Essay Prize (1996) and the Vergílio Ferreira Prize (2002). Óscar Lopes passed away on March 22, 2013.