An Inauguration of the Future

FLORENCIA GARRAMUÑO

Evanston, IL

Conferencia; Invited lecture; 2021

Northwestern University

On the 100th anniversary of Clarice Lispector?s birth, her literature has become greatly popular, contrasting the reception her work had at the beginning that, even if extensive and warm, highlighted the strangeness of a prose that did not correspond at all with what Brazilian literary tradition had designed until then. Nowadays, Lispector?s books are translated over and over into different languages, and a certain ?Claricean? tone, we might say, impregnates a contemporary sensitivity for which her writing appears to be much less exotic or strange than what was perceived at the beginning of her career. What does this difference in the reception of Lispector?s literature account for? There are many reasons, and there are several paths of research to analyze this phenomenon. The itinerary I am mostly interested in exploring implies questioning a transformation of Clarice Lispector?s own literature, from her first novels to her last texts, a kind of purification of her writing that turns her novels into something that is much closer to contemporary literature.