A Discourse of Silence: The Postmodernism of Clarice Lispector
1987; University of Wisconsin Press; Volume: 28; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/1208309
ISSN1548-9949
Autores Tópico(s)Literature, Culture, and Criticism
ResumoCritics have long recognized silence as one of the chief distinguishing characteristics of Clarice Lispector's prose fiction. Taking many forms and playing many roles, it permeates her work. Summing up the majority view on this fundamental issue, Elizabeth Lowe notes, The heart of Clarice Lispector's world is silence, the quiet glow beyond action and beyond words that she, as her own greatest protagonist, tirelessly sought.' Pervaded by a sense of blockage, of isolation and frustration, however, Lispector's fiction can be revealingly read as a discourse of silence,2 a lyrically rendered yet ironically self-conscious commentary on the evanescent relationships among language, human cognition, and reality. In focusing on these metafictional issues, the novels and stories of Clarice Lispector exemplify the kind of writing described as postmodernist, writing that takes as a primary subject the nature of fiction itself, the processes through which it makes its statements.3 But while in Lispector's work are several key aspects of postmodernist literature,4 none is more representative of this particular
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