Congratulations to Prof. Caio Yurgel for publishing the article "The Discovery of Lispector: Reading The Hour of the Star in the Classroom" co-written with DKU students Eldar Wang, Weiran Li, Jade Jen, Xiaomeng Yan, Zainab Farooqui, Shuming Zhang and Yiping Tian.
Introduction:
To name a thing is to kill it: by making it visible, we can no longer see it otherwise. Teaching Clarice Lispector in English to students who were hearing of her for the first time posed an unexpected problem: she became Lispector, never Clarice. The problem was mine rather than theirs—how to read Lispector sans Clarice is only a challenge to those of us who have grown accustomed to her presence, her voice, her one-sided intimacy, and thus are moved to a first-name basis: Clarice. When translated into Portuguese, Benjamin Moser’s Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector (2009) became, simply, Clarice,—the extra comma added for good measure, as if saying that we may import scholarship, but we draw the line on nomenclature.
To utter these three syllables in Brazil means to conjure the might and the myth of a writer who eludes all labelling, who is beloved by some and shunned as “hermetic” or “apolitical” by others, whose Brazilianness is both claimed and contested. What these three little syllables are saying—“Cla-ree-ce, light of my life”—is that, for literary purposes, the name is already taken: any other writers or writers-to-be misfortunate enough to have received the same three sets of syllables as their name should waste no time before changing it.
But here we are, in a world—or a classroom—where the name Clarice holds no power, where these three syllables mean little more than three foreign sounds, where they do not name as much as they ask: who, then, is this Lispector woman? Unnamed, Clarice remains alive—she can still be seen otherwise.
What follows here are the insights and impressions of seven undergraduate students discovering Lispector for the first time: Zainab Farooqui begins by exploring the many meanings and implications of the novella’s thirteen titles. Shuming Zhang follows suit by making us see The Hour of the Star not as a text, but as a painting—a still-life with strawberries. Weiran Li takes us further into the myth of Lispector by proposing a novel reading of her life and work under the sign of stubbornness. Xiaomeng Yan asks existentialism’s hard-hitting questions: neither we nor Macabéa asked to be born, so what should we do with this life we were given? Jade Jen continues this conversation by bringing time into the equation and suggesting we rethink where the novel ends and where it begins. Moving to an extra-textual level, Eldar Wang delves into the little explored reception of Lispector in China while Yiping Tian proposes a data-driven analysis of the novel’s translation into Chinese and English.