Current PhD Student

Same Coe

Thesis Title:

“My sparkling mutations”: The Limits of Identity in the Kaleidoscopic Fiction of Clarice Lispector

Supervisor:

Dr. Nicoletta Asciuto

Description:

My thesis focuses on the fiction of the Brazilian author Clarice Lispector (1920-1977), whose work has resisted ready categorisation by critics since her debut novel Near to the Wild Heart in 1943. Labelled variously as a modernist, an existentialist, a (post-)structuralist, a feminist and a mystic (among others), the prevailing critical trend has leant towards monothematic or single text readings of Lispector’s work which cannot help but give a false impression of her actual breadth and scope as a writer. Such positions are further troubled by her poetics, which repeatedly emphasises a non-mastery of the text, relying heavily on equivocation and contradiction (in her words “passing through the opposite of what it approaches”) in a bid to avoid being conclusive or delimiting.

When the narrator of Água viva tells the reader “I am not promiscuous, but I am kaleidoscopic”, Lispector gives us perhaps the most clear-eyed statement regarding how she perceives the interactions between her texts and the different shifting perspectives they offer. I take the idea of “kaleidoscopic” at face value, proposing to read Lispector through three positions or identities which are particularly formative (as well as critically generative) for her texts: her Brazilianness, her Jewishness, her literary engagement with feminist problematics. In triangulating Lispector’s writing through the intersection of these three positions, while paying careful attention to where her texts exceed and trouble such positions, I offer a way into her texts which avoids totalising or too narrowly defining the content and movements of her writing. What emerges is a repeated conception of identity as a practice and a performance, both within Lispector’s texts and in how she mobilises the facets of her multiple identities in the creation of those texts.

Outside of my research on Lispector and Lusophone literature, I am interested in global modernisms, translation, and writing which blurs the boundary between philosophy and fiction. I have a forthcoming biocritical entry on Lispector as part of the EUTERPE Project, which focuses on the work of 20 th Century transnational and multilingual female authors. Prior to my PhD at York, I studied a BA and MA in Philosophy at University of Leeds, with a particular interest in the philosophy of language and metaethics.