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 numerous commentators who not only in Brazil but also throughout the world investigate Clarice Lispector’s work encounter several aspects to highlight in her multifaceted writing.1 From the fruitful tension between transcendence and contingence to the profound and refined attention to the human condition, one can encounter an immense variety of dimensions in her body of writings.
Caetano Veloso says that when he showed the acoustic version of his song “Odeio” (I hate), which would be included on the Cê album, to his friend and composer Jorge Mautner, the latter cried and told him that it was the most beautiful love song that he had ever heard.
[...] 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”.
The professor and writer Evando Nascimento gave a class on the work of Clarice Lispector at the IMS Rio. His talk is based on the category of “thinking literature.”
The year 2017 marked the 40th anniversary of The Hour of the Star, the last book written by Clarice Lispector, which was published in the year of her death.
