The space of the body in Perto do coração selvagem: Re-signifying the World

Abstract

Perto do coração selvagem, Clarice Lispector's novel, caused a real 'frisson' in academia. Breaking with the aesthetic standards that characterized the writing of other texts of the time, more realistic and predictable in terms of content and form, this enigmatic work for many, instigating for others, revolutionizes the literary universe due to the unusual force with which the body and the senses are evoked and worked on in the text, revealing in an unusual and impactful way, the writer's plunge into the feminine universe and her attempt to capture and translate the unrevealed mysteries of being a woman through the body/knowledge relationship. Written in the forties, Clarice Lispector already showed, through her debut novel, the changing feminine. The analysis developed here aims to point out the way in which this novel provokes certain social and ideological displacements insofar as the inscriptions of knowledge are processed through the body, inverting, in this way, the traditional paradigms about the acquisition of knowledge sustained in and through for the reason. This necessarily implies pointing out issues related to the production of meaning and the relations of power and domination that mark both the limits and the positions of subjects in the social context.