Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

"A hora da estrela" and "Um sopro de vida": Parodies of Narrative Power

1991; CIESPAL; Volume: 20; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/29740384

2327-4247

María José Somerlate Barbosa,

Linguistics and Education Research

Through the ironic treatment of authorship, Clarice Lispector parodies the narrators in A hora da estrela (1977) and Urn sopro de vida (1978) and unmasks their logocentric search for logic and unity in discourse. By analogy, she undermines the system that has always privileged male writers and their visions of die world in the literary tradition. Literary historians generally agree that, by the end of the eighteenth century, the novel had already been accepted as an honorable genre and, for that reason, certain conventions of the novel, such as anonymity and pseudonymity, had become much more elastic for the male writer. Long after the practice of anonymity had disappeared, female novelists, however, still had to protect themselves under pennames to avoid flattery or prejudice from editors, male peers, and the reading public; so much so that anonymity became a feminine trait in respectable fiction'* (Watson 61). In A hora da estrela, Lispector toys with the notion of anonymity to subvert and parody the concept of male hegemony in the literary tradition. For instance, in the introductory 116