UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Los Angeles The Alter-Worlds of Lispector and Saer and the End(s) of Latin American literature A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Comparative Literature By Peter James Lehman 2013 © Copyright 2013 Peter James Lehman ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION The Alter-Worlds of Lispector and Saer and the End(s) of Latin American Literature By Peter James Lehman Doctor of Philosophy in Comparative Literature University of California, Los Angeles, 2013 Professor Randal Johnson, Co-chair Professor Kirstie McClure, Co-chair My dissertation seeks to intervene in current debates about both comparative perspectives within Latin American literatures and the place of Latin America within new models of world literature. Despite the importance of this call to a more planetary approach to literature, the turn to a world scope often recapitulates problems associated with the nineteenth century emergence of the term “world literature”: local concerns and traditions dissolve into the search for general patterns or persistent dependencies. If these new comparative models tend to separate the local from the construction of literature’s “world,” significant strains of Latin Americanist criticism have also sought to distance the local from literature and the literary, often identifying the latter alternatively with either the collapse of previous emancipatory dreams or a complicity with power and domination. Focusing on several central narrative texts of the Brazilian Clarice ! ii! Lispector and the Argentine Juan José Saer, I argue for a more contested notion of both the literary and the world. Both Lispector’s and Saer’s pairs of narrative texts in this dissertation make it difficult to untangle the literary construction of their respective worlds from local forms of alterity and otherness. Despite the differences between Saer’s attention to an apparently more circumscribed local world in the littoral zone of Santa, Fe, Argentina, and Lispector’s more seemingly abstract flights from place, their writing nonetheless meets in common spaces and experiences that have little to do with either a recognizably “Latin American” aesthetics or the generality of a world model free from contradiction, suffering, and the traces of history. In part one, on Lispector’s A paixão segundo G.H. (1964) and A hora da estrela (1977), and part two on Saer’s El entenado (1983) and El río sin orillas (1990), I explore the different ways that their writing alternatively represents or contains the possibility of altering the world and selves in literature. While the dictatorship period negatively inflects this possibility in both A hora da estrela and El entenado, I argue that the inscription of their literary worlds into local, national, and regional traditions becomes a resource for more subtle connections between the texts and the periods, calling into question the attempts to make literature tell a story of either collapse or hope at end of the last century. ! iii! The Dissertation of Peter James Lehman is approved. Michelle Clayton Randal Johnson, Committee Co-Chair Kirstie McClure, Committee Co-chair University of California, Los Angeles 2013 ! iv! Table of Contents Introduction: The Alter-Worlds of Lispector and Saer and the Ends of Latin American Literature (1 – 45) Part I: Clarice Lispector Chapter 1 Neither Integration nor Disintegration: Paths of Desertion in A paixão segundo G.H. (46-101) Chapter 2 Negative Constellations: The Delimitation of Ends and the Thousand Point Petition in A hora da estrela (102-136) Part II: Juan José Saer Chapter 3 The Stages of World Literature or a “Taste of the Planet?” An Aesthetics of Place Between the Cannibal Collective and the Desert in El entenado (137-190) Chapter 4 Incorporative Violence and a Right to Leisure: Myth, Awakening, and Alteration in the World of El río sin orillas (191-252) End Notes (248-281) Works Cited (282-316) ! v! Peter James Lehman Department of Comparative Literature University of California Los Angeles 1278 S. Cloverdale Ave. Los Angeles, CA 90019 Email: [email protected] Phone: (310) 500-9217 Education University of Chicago Masters of Arts in the Humanities University of California, Santa Cruz B.A. in Literature and Creative Writing Dissertation The Alter-Worlds of Lispector and Saer and the End(s) of Latin American Literature Committee: Randal Johnson and Kirstie McClure (Co-Chairs); Michelle Clayton; Eleanor Kaufman; and Katherine King Research and Teaching Interests • 20th and 21st century Latin American literature and culture with a comparative focus on Brazil and Argentina • The intersections between labor, race, gender, and literary form • Culture and politics in the dictatorship and post-dictatorship periods • Documentary Film (Brazilian, Argentine, Latin American) • Aesthetics, politics, and ethics in Marxian and post-Marxian thought Honors, Awards, and Grants • UCLA Departmental Travel Grant for Archival Research and Interviews, Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, Brazil (Summer 2009) • UCLA Summer Research Mentorships (Summer 2007, Summer 2006) • FLAS, Portuguese Year Long (2005-2006) • UCLA, Lippman Fellowship (Fall 2004-Spring 2008) • Catherine Ham Memorial Award for Outstanding Critical Thesis, University of Chicago, Thesis for the Master of the Arts Program in the Humanities (June 2002) Teaching Experience • Teaching Assistant Coordinator for the UCLA Department of Comparative Literature (2011-2012): responsible for designing and teaching the pedagogy for new TAs. Teaching Fellow/Instructor (responsible for course design and teaching): ! vi! • UCLA Comparative Literature 4DW: “World Literature Otherwise: Planetary Places, Imaginary Networks, and Spectral Pasts”; “Planetary Appetites, Worldly Materials, and Postcolonial Imaginaries” (Literature from Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, and the Middle East)—3 quarters • UCLA Comparative Literature 4CW: “Bordering the Human: A Survey of Literature from the Age of the Enlightenment to the 20th Century”—5 quarters. • UCLA Writing Program, English 3 (Composition)—4 quarters • CSULB (California State University Long Beach) Comparative World Literature 320i: “The Comic Spirit”—1 quarter Teaching Assistant (led discussion sections for literature survey courses)—7 quarters Professional Experience and Academic Service • Research Assistant for Professor Michelle Clayton, UCLA (Summer 2008). • Contributing editor (2005-2006) then editor for Mester (2006-2007) for the graduate student-run journal of the department of Spanish and Portuguese at UCLA • Co-director with Professor Elizabeth Marchant of Brazil at Large, an interdisciplinary working group sponsored by the Center for Modern and Contemporary Studies at UCLA (2004-2005) Presentations and Conferences • “’Vista parcial da cidade’: The Urban Stories of Luiz Ruffato,” a critical introduction to the UC Berkeley Distinguished Writer in Residence, followed by a bilingual reading in the UCLA Department of Spanish and Portuguese (April 2012). • “The Tropics of Interregionalism and the Indigestible Planet: Contention within World Literature,” presented at the panel “Beyond ‘Worlding the World’: Debates and Alternatives in Comparative Literature” at Global Languages, Local Cultures, ACLA Annual Meeting, Boston, MA (March 2009) • “A Call for the Same? The Place of Subtraction in Juan José Saer’s El río sin orillas”; Arrivals and Departures, ACLA Annual Meeting, Long Beach, CA (April 2008) • “Anticipating the Storms: Desarmando the Future in Ricardo Piglia’s La ciudad ausente”; Interrupting the Future, Institute for Comparative Literature and Society Graduate Student Conference, Columbia University (April 2008) • “Undigested Marginalia: Anthropophagy and Patrícia Galvão’s Parque Industrial”; Transformations: Re-imagining Identity, Graduate Student Conference, UCLA Department of Spanish and Portuguese (2006) • Co-organizer of the conference and respondent, Mixing at the Margins: Contemporary Brazilian Cultural Production, organized by the working group Brazil at Large, UCLA (February 2005) Professional Associations Modern Language Association (MLA), Brazilian Studies Association (BRASA), Latin American Studies Association (LASA), American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) Languages Spoken • Near-native fluency in Portuguese, Spanish • Advanced Reading proficiency in French ! vii! Introduction: The Alter-Worlds of Lispector and Saer, and the End(s) of Latin American Literature Since the “boom” of Latin American literature in the 1960s, comparative models of world literature and Latin American studies have seemed to move in opposite directions. The current revival of “world literature” as a concept has reasserted the need to think literature on a more planetary scale. We have thus witnessed in recent years an increasing turn to the “world” in literary criticism and philosophy as a response to the current phase of globalization. In the new literary models or approaches, a world space does not appear primarily as an image, imaginary, or representation, but rather as a relational structure, system, or circulation of works beyond their culture or language “of origin.”1 Despite a common emphasis on the asymmetry of its world space, the predominant models of a new world literature nonetheless seem to presuppose a kind of transcendental axis that accounts for literary relevance (or irrelevance) from a place more or less still located in Europe or the U.S. Thus what Pascale Casanova calls the “Greenwich meridian” of