The STUDIA UNIVERSITATIS BABEŞ-BOLYAI issue article summary

The summary of the selected article appears at the bottom of the page. In order to get back to the contents of the issue this article belongs to you have to access the link from the title. In order to see all the articles of the archive which have as author/co-author one of the authors mentioned below, you have to access the link from the author's name.

 
       
         
    STUDIA PHILOLOGIA - Issue no. 2 / 2024  
         
  Article:   LISTENING AND LEGIBILITY: URBAN SURFACES AGAINST ‘OVERARCHING MEANINGS’ IN LISPECTOR’S THE BESIEGED CITY.

Authors:  CĂLINA PĂRĂU.
 
       
         
  Abstract:   DOI: 10.24193/subbphilo.2024.2.03

Article history: Received 05 February 2024; Revised 04 April 2024; Accepted 10 April 2024; Available online 25 June 2024; Available print 30 June 2024.
pp. 61-72

VIEW PDF

FULL PDF

ABSTRACT: Listening and Legibility: Urban Surfaces Against “Overarching Meanings” in Lispector’s The Besieged City. This paper looks into the literary dismantlement of projections of totality and objectified knowledge in women’s modern writing, focusing on Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector’s novel The Besieged City. My central claim is that her writing opposes “geographies of reason,” indirectly arguing for an untranslatability of the self inside modernity’s model of legibility and communication. In this novel, Lispector’s alternative to the discoursing, male-dominant, rational public realm is not the introspective inner space of subjectivity, but an innovative world-making poiesis founded on the substitution of the individual self with “the wider life of the world” that remains always a-centric and anti-textual. I investigate the ways in which Lispector opposes opaqueness to legibility, seeking the uncharted territory outside the logic of historical time or the colonial gaze. Reading Lispector’s novel through the notion of “writing by ear” (bearing multiple meanings, mostly in relation to the re-negotiation of the voice-dominant Western perception about writing) will prove useful in understanding the intricate and tangled relation between Euro-American literature and the Global South in terms of complex forms of heritage hybridization and designs of global memory.

Keywords: poiesis, totality, Global South, creolization, urban, listening, modernity
 
         
     
         
         
      Back to previous page