Clarice Lispector: Existentialism and Dark Femininity

CLASS DESCRIPTION

“Sphinx, sorceress, sacred monster. The revival of the hypnotic Clarice Lispector has been one of the true literary events of the twenty-first century.” – Parul Seghal, The New York Times

Brazilian novelist and short story writer Clarice Lispector is a figure that remains partially shrouded in mystery to this day. Her works were largely unknown to Western audiences prior to the 2009 publication of her biography, Why This World? by Benjamin Moser. A subsequent wave of interest brought forth projects to expansively translate her work; readers were enthralled by her weaving together of lyrical prose, philosophical inquiry, and unsettling depictions of her and her characters’ interior life. Her stark confrontations with death and nothingness reveal that at the heart of her writing is an encounter with the void: the silence that underlies human existence, the dissolution of identity, and a confrontation with mortality that exposes the fragility of the meaning we give to existence itself.

This lecture will situate Lispector’s writings within a broader framework of existentialist thought, drawing connections to philosophers such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. Her narratives often place characters at thresholds, moments of rupture in which the familiar world collapses and the subject comes face to face with an abyss that resists the limits of human comprehension. Death becomes not merely an ending but a continual presence that haunts one’s everyday life, and the void of death as other to life opens a space for radical re-evaluation of the subject and one’s relationship to the world.

Through close readings of works such as The Passion According to G.H., The Hour of the Star, Near to the Wild Heart, The Complete Stories and others, this lecture will demonstrate how Lispector stages moments of existential revelation through narrative and text. Her use of experimental language – fragmentary and filled with interruptions – enacts existential struggle on the level of form, pressing against the limits of what can be expressed. Her treatment of existence is not solely depicted as philosophical abstraction, but as an intimate, bodily experience, inflected by questions of gender, marginality, and cultural identity. Her female characters often encounter moments that blur the boundaries between domestic banality and metaphysical insight, suggesting that existential confrontations are inseparable from all embodied and situated experience. In this sense, Lispector expands the existentialist tradition, emphasising the uncanny texture of ordinary life, and insisting on inhabiting the anxieties of mortality, rather than resolving them, as a deeply liberatory act.

ABOUT OUR LECTURER

Anna Titov is a writer and researcher in continental philosophy. She is a CHASE-AHRC funded doctoral researcher at the University of East Anglia, working on embodied experience and perceptions of nature in the works of Friedrich Nietzsche. Her areas of interest are phenomenology and existentialism, deep ecology, and esoteric spiritualities.

She completed an MA in Continental Philosophy at Warwick in 2021, with a dissertation that looked at trans-anthropocentrism in Nietzsche's middle writings. Her areas of interest are phenomenology, embodied philosophy, and esoteric spiritualities.

Instagram: @aatitov

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Monday 1st December

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Encountering The Void: The Existentialist Writings Of Clarice Lispector

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