, The Clarice Factor. IMS Clarice Lispector, 2017. Disponível em: https://site.claricelispector.ims.com.br/en/2017/03/20/o-fator-clarice/. Acesso em: 04 April 2025.
The Moreira Salles Institute, in partnership with the Department of Humanities at Columbia University, presents the international seminar The Clarice Factor: Aesthetics, Gender, and Diaspora in Brazil, which will take place on the 23rd (Thursday), 24th (Friday), and 29th (Wednesday) of March, at Casa Hispánica, in New York City.
The inaugural milestone of the collaboration between IMS and Columbia University began in December 2015, at the Institute’s headquarters in Rio de Janeiro, with the colloquium Brazil: Global Crossing, which brought together Columbia University researchers, Brazilian professors and specialists, in addition to the coordinators of the IMS collection, in multidisciplinary discussions on the modernization process in Brazil.
Since then relations between the two institutions have strengthened with the announcement of the new event organized by Ana Paulina Lee and Graziela Montaldo, from the Department of Iberian and Latin American Cultures at Columbia University, and by the IMS Research Directorate.
Completely dedicated to discussions on Clarice’s writing as performance, form, sound, and material, the tables will mostly occur on the 24th, with the participation of researcher-professors from several universities. IMS guests include Carlos Mendes de Sousa, Vilma Arêas (University of São Paulo-Campinas), and Yudith Rosenbaum (University of São Paulo). Also confirmed are Katrina Dodson, award-winning translator for the edition of TheComplete Stories, and Argentinian Gabriel Giorgi, Associate Professor at New York University.
The event will also feature the installation Edge of Nothing by theater director Dara Malina, who in 2015 had adapted The Hour of the Star for the theater at the same university.
This August, Todas as crônicas will be released, a volume that brings together for the first time all the chronicles written by Clarice Lispector for newspapers and magazines.
The film Clarice's Days in Washington captures a very different and decisive moment in the life and work of the writer, when she lived in the American capital with her family, between 1952 and 1959. In addition to a significant number of unpublished photographs – which record her domestic environment and interactions with friends – there are precious images filmed during a public event, in which the writer, her husband Maury Gurgel Valente, their son Paulo, in addition to friends of the couple appear.
I believe that Clarice and I shared a common feeling: objects are not inanimate, on the contrary, they have a secret life. I do not know if the reader has already tried turning off the lights at night in your room and, little by little, noticed that your eyes adapt to the dark and finally you can perceive the living presence of things.
The work of Clarice Lispector revolves around on two notions: the symbol and the thing. The thing, physics, and the symbol, metaphysics; the thing, immanence, and the symbol, transcendence; the thing, the body, and the symbol, language; the thing, existence, and the symbol, the saying; the thing, the event, and the symbol, the way to make it possible to read the nonsymbolizable thing.
, A Wild Review of Near to the Wild Heart. IMS Clarice Lispector, 2017. Disponível em: https://site.claricelispector.ims.com.br/en/2017/03/03/uma-critica-selvagem-para-perto-do-coracao/. Acesso em: 04 April 2025.
It is the end of 1943. A publishing house of little cultural relevance, A Noite, releases the exceptional original version of Near to the Wild Heart, a book by a 22-year-old author and former employee of the publisher. Two of the main critics of the time, Álvaro Lins and Otto Maria Carpeaux, had prior access to the manuscripts. Both the editor of the prestigious José Olympio and Carpeaux advised against its publication. Contrary to these opinions, the book comes out with an initial print run of a thousand copies (sold out by June of the following year). The author does not earn much beyond a hundred copies to distribute among friends and family.
Lins, as one of the most respected critics and also editor-in-chief of the newspaper Correio da Manhã, will publish in the aforementioned newspaper on February 11, 1944 the article “Lyrical Novel,” dedicated to Near to the Wild Heart and its unknown author, Clarice Lispector.
The arguments the critic uses, read from today’s perspective, guarantee a reading that on the one hand is absurd in how it uses as a criterion the female gender in opposition to the male gender to justify many aspects of the work, and on the other hand does not fail to be amusing.
A characteristic of women’s literature is the very visible and ostensive, foregrounded presence of the author’s personality. Certainly, in a general sense every literary work must be the expression, the revelation of a personality. Yet in male temperaments there is a greater tendency to make the author a figure hidden behind his creations (…) next one sees that women are particularly inclined towards these literary forms that permit more direct and sensitive projections of their personalities.
Álvaro Lins will place the novel within the lyrical, “the discovery of a new psychological world, (…) this kind of adventure, of exploration through terrains of human passions that until then have been unexplored,” choosing as exemplary the literature produced by Proust, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf.
And the work of poetic and psychological adventure, more than any other, is the modern English novel, in which a few women writers are the most representative figures. And the union of lyricism with realism, of the poetic sentiment with the capacity for observation, is what removes from the modern poetic novel its tendency toward gluttony and a rosy view of life. (…) There is no contradiction between lyricism and an acute vision of the world, a vision that is sometimes poignant and cruel. An example in fiction of this surprising effect that emerged from the intertwining of lyricism and realism is in the work of Virginia Woolf.
And within this tradition, “I am not afraid to affirm, however,” says the critic, “that the book of Mrs. Clarisse Lispector (sic) is the first definite experiment of the modern lyrical novel made in Brazil,” combining the technique of the author of Ulysses with the “female temperament.”
Although he recognizes that Near to the Wild Heart “provokes right away a disturbing surprise. The surprise of things that are truly new and original,” Lins concludes the article by presenting the novel as incomplete, “full of images, but without intimate unity. Here are pieces of a great novel, but not the great novel that the author will, undoubtedly, be able to write later.”
Clarice, recently married and living in Belém, writes to her sister Tânia Kaufmann, on February 16 – that is, five days after publication of this article: “The reviews are not good for me. The one by Álvaro Lins (…) depressed me and that was good in a way. I wrote to him saying I was unfamiliar with Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Proust when I wrote the book, because the devil of a man all but called me a ‘commercial representative’ for these writers.” But the somewhat annoyed letter was not sent, in the end.
In a less exalted spirit, Clarice herself considers the review and says in a new missive from February 23: “I didn’t write to Álvaro Lins saying that about the novel not being ‘my novel’ because I didn’t interpret his review like that.”
At this point, however, neither Álvaro Lins nor Clarice were aware that in October of the same year Near to the Wild Heart would receive the Graça Aranha award, whose main selection criteria was for debut books “with a marked character of originality.”
A Manhã, October 13, 1943/Hemeroteca Digital
The Foundation had already honored the premières of Rachel de Queiroz, Erico Verissimo, Jorge de Lima, and Murilo Mendes, among others. Later, in the column “Livros do dia – dois minutos no país das letras” (Books of the day – two minutes in literature country), among several small literary news items there was an almost prophetic note written by an unknown J.B.: “(…) The Graça Aranha Foundation concedes the highly coveted prize award for the greatest female debut of all time in Brazilian literature. Clarice Lispector, author of Near to the Wild Heart, is honored with her beautiful book. Never has there been so much justice in the granting of a literary award.”
Academic studies on Clarice Lispector continue to be developed at foreign universities. In 2017, a wide-ranging seminar about the author was held at the University of Oxford.
In partnership with the Department of Humanities at Columbia University, the IMS presents the international seminar The Clarice Factor: Aesthetics, Gender, and Diaspora in Brazil.
The Complete Stories, a volume of short stories by Clarice Lispector edited by Benjamin Moser, was included on the prestigious list of 100 Best Books of 2015.
In addition to confirming the value of the biographical genre as a privileged means to meet the demands of a curious public about the past of famous personalities, Teresa Montero challenges the genre’s conventions by reconstructing the family life, personal experiences, friendships, and creative process of Clarice Lispector, an author who, with all her strengths, gave life to her vocation for literature as a fatality and a salvation.
