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.
A little known concept in Portuguese, unediting is less a theory and more a practical way to support complex publishing cases, such as the publication of A Breath of Life, a posthumous novel by Clarice Lispector organized by Olga Borelli. The aim of unediting is to undo the illusion of transparency that the ready, finished, and linear book, with a minimally stabilized narrative, conveys to readers.
The word “unfamiliar” is used by Clarice Lispector in several of her works. To be precise, in the original Portuguese, Clarice employed the neologism infamiliar, which is not in the dictionary, though it cannot be affirmed that the author is the source of this term in Brazilian literature. Nonetheless, by mentioning the word “unfamiliar” at least sixteen times, whether in novels, short stories, or chronicles, the author makes this unique signifier an object of greater attention.
More or less fantastic in their plots, these children’s stories reveal narrators who, stripped almost completely of their fictional character, are very similar to the author: they are mothers, writers, they go by the initials “C.L.,” or even say their name is Clarice. Thus, if there is a horizontal posture in these narrators in which respect for the particularities of childhood is presupposed, this same movement also shows the desire to become a little more like a child.
Ulysses was Clarice Lispector’s last dog, a mongrel who stole cigarette butts and queued for Coca-Cola and whiskey for visitors. He was so eccentric that he earned a robust note in the infamous periodical O Pasquim.
