, LispectorFest at the University of Tennessee. IMS Clarice Lispector, 2017. Disponível em: https://site.claricelispector.ims.com.br/en/2017/01/04/lispectorfest-na-universidade-do-tennessee/. Acesso em: 08 January 2026.
Every year the University of Tennessee prepares AuthorFest, a series of activities to celebrate the work of a single author. During the month of October 2016, in its second edition, AuthorFest paid tribute to Clarice Lispector.
Among the events offered to the public, in a collaboration between the Department of Modern Foreign Languages and Literatures and the Knox County Public Library, there was a guided reading of The Mystery of the Thinking Rabbit, an exhibition of works of art by Professor Rubens Ghenov inspired by the novel The Passion According to G.H., and a session of the film The Hour of the Star, which was directed by Suzana Amaral, followed by a discussion mediated by Euridice Silva-Filho, research professor at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville.
One of the most anticipated activities of LispectorFest was the lecture by Katrina Dodson, translator of the Complete Stories (New Directions, 2016). In “Rediscovering Clarice” Katrina comments, from her own experience, on the influence of the recent translation in the construction of a kind of “Lispectormania.”
The IMS, in partnership with UT Knoxville’s College of Arts and Sciences, has made this lecture available in full.
The film portrays the famous Ulisses, Clarice Lispector’s dog and a prominent character in her life and fiction. He is present in the posthumous novel A Breath of Life, he is the narrator of the children’s book Quase de verdade (Almost True), he was mentioned in countless chronicles, and today he is immortalized, alongside his owner, in a bronze statue at Leme Beach, in Rio de Janeiro.
Clarice’s connection with politics does not take place on the surface of public life, or in the texts that directly address the issue. This is due to the writer’s understanding of the rift between art and politics, which is addressed in two related texts, “Literature and Justice” and “What I Would Like to Have Been,” in which she observes with disconcerting lucidity the uselessness of her literature as a political instrument.
[...] throughout all of Clarice’s work there is a dazzling – almost primordial, inaugural, Edenic – vision of gender, of the man-woman division. One notes a frightened fascination that there is a male-animal-man in the world, as we read, for example, in the short story “The Buffalo,” and also in another story about phantasmic and monstrous masculinity titled “The Dinner”.
Correio para mulheres (Women’s Mail), edited by Aparecida Maria Nunes, includes texts by Clarice Lispector directed towards a female readership and written in three distinct moments in the writer’s career.
