Examining Whiteness: Reading Clarice Lispector Through Bessie Head and Toni Morrison

✍ Scribed by Lucia Villares

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011/2017
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 215
• Series: Legenda
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Critics consider Clarice Lispector the leading female writer in the Brazilian literary canon. Her connections with the nation, however, seem to magically disappear as her work is analysed. This paradox is the starting point for this analysis of the works of an author who - despite being born in the Ukraine - grew up to be an irreplacable presence in Brazilian literature. Non-Brazilian authors, such as the South African Bessie Head and the North American Toni Morrison, provide triggering concepts to help tackle a blind-spot in Brazilian culture: the issue of racial difference. From this new perspective, overlooked black characters in Lispector's work become crucial and relevant, and whiteness emerges as an unexamined set of norms.

✦ Table of Contents

Cover......Page 1
Half Title......Page 2
Title......Page 6
Copyright......Page 7
Contents......Page 8
Dedication......Page 9
Acknowledgements......Page 10
Copyrights and Translations......Page 12
Introduction: Clarice Lispector, Subjectivity and the National......Page 14
The Threshold of the Unspeakable......Page 17
The Pathological as a Way into the National......Page 38
PART I......Page 52
1 A Question of Power: Unspeakable Miscegenation......Page 53
2 Haunting in Toni Morrison's Beloved......Page 71
PART II......Page 92
3 Welcoming the Ghost: Haunting in A paixão segundo G.H.......Page 93
4 Whiteness and the Construction of Subjectivity in O lustre......Page 112
5 Modernization and the Phantasmagoria of Commodities in A cidade sitiada......Page 139
6 Whiteness and Masculinity in A maçã escuro......Page 164
7 Racism and the Performance of Whiteness in A hora da estrela......Page 180
Conclusion......Page 202
Works Cited......Page 207
Index......Page 212