UNWRITING THE AUTHOR: AFFECT AND AUTHORSHIP IN MACEDONIO FERNÁNDEZ, FELISBERTO HERNÁNDEZ, AND CLARICE LISPECTOR By Camille Jordan Sutton Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Vanderbilt University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in Spanish May, 2014 Nashville, Tennessee Approved: Benigno Trigo, Ph.D. Cathy Jrade, Ph.D. Earl Fitz, Ph.D. Jennifer Fay, Ph.D. Copyright © 2014 by Camille Jordan Sutton All rights reserved For David, Owen, and Avery, the loves of my life and In loving memory of my father, Louis Bernard (Sandy) Sutton (1948-2006) iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am deeply appreciative of the efforts of the many people with whom I have had the pleasure of working on this project. I cannot begin to properly express my gratitude to my dissertation advisor, Professor Benigno Trigo, for his guidance, mentorship, and intellectual generosity in the classroom, during the dissertation stage, through the academic job search process, and beyond. I am also very grateful to my dissertation committee, Professor Cathy Jrade, and Professor Earl Fitz (from the Vanderbilt Spanish and Portuguese Department) and Professor Jennifer Fay (from the Vanderbilt English Department/Film Studies Program), for their support and encouragement every step of the way. A Summer Research Award from the College of Arts and Science and a Dissertation Enhancement Grant from the Graduate School allowed me to visit the Felisberto Hernández Collection at American University (2012) and the Merlin H. Forster Collection at the University of Texas (2013), trips that proved invaluable for this project. The service-free Fall 2013 semester granted by the Department of Spanish and Portuguese allowed me to make major progress on the dissertation. I also benefited greatly from the generous family policies of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, under the effective leadership of the Chair, Professor Cathy Jrade, for which I am tremendously grateful. I am thankful to have had the chance to work with some wonderful professors in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Vanderbilt University, a vibrant community of scholars: Professor Victoria Burrus, Professor Edward Friedman, Professor Carlos Jáuregui, Professor Christina Karageorgou-Bastea, Professor William Luis, Professor Emanuelle Oliveira, Professor Philip Rasico, and Professor Andrés Zamora. I am also grateful to have gotten to know v Professor Márcio Bahia, Professor Susan Berk-Seligson, and Professor Michelle Shepherd, as well as the new faculty in the Department, Professor José Cárdenas and Professor Ruth Hill. I am grateful to the language coordinators who supervised my teaching during my time at Vanderbilt, who set a wonderful pedagogical example and helped me develop my teaching skills: Frances Alpren, Professor Márcio Bahia, Dr. Chalene Helmuth, Clint Hendrix, Dr. Carolina Palacios, Dr. Paz Pintané, and Raquel Rincón. Thank you to Department secretaries Lilliana Rodríguez and Cindy Martínez, for their efficient assistance and support over the course of my time at Vanderbilt. Thank you to Todd Hughes and Felekech Tigabu of the Center for Second Language Studies for their advice, support, and friendship. Thank you to my colleagues, fellow graduate students Alana Álvarez, Belkis Barrios, Laura Cade Brown, Karin Davidovich, Cory Duclos, Ben Galina, León Guerrero Ayala, Anna- Lisa Halling, James Krause, John Maddox, Heather Bishop McRae, Clara Mengolini, Megan Myers, Santiago Quintero, Rosie Seagraves, Tugba Sevin, Alonso Varo, Steven Wenz, Ty West, and Boston Woolfolk. I have learned so much from our exchange of ideas over the course of our time together. A special thanks to Denise Callejas, the best writing partner anyone could ask for. I will miss working together in assorted Nashville coffee shops bouncing scholarly (and not so scholarly!) ideas off each other. I am very grateful to Professor Jon Beasley-Murray of the University of British Columbia, for his mentorship during my Master’s studies and his continued support and encouragement throughout my doctoral studies and beyond. This dissertation would likely never have come to fruition without the availability of loving, reliable, competent, and affordable childcare for my son and daughter, who were born vi during my graduate studies. For that, Ms. Brenda, Ms. Cynthia, and Ms. Kenitha at Agape Group Daycare in Nashville have my eternal gratitude. And above all, I am thankful for the support of my family in Vancouver, Orlando, and Nashville: my loving husband, Dave; our beautiful children, Owen and Avery; our saint of a dog, Clive; my sister and best friend, Lindsay Sutton; my beloved Mom and Big Joe; and my wonderful in-laws: Frieda, David Sr., and the whole family. I love you all very much. Camille Jordan Sutton March, 2014 vii TABLE OF CONTENTS DEDICATION…………………………………………………………………………………... iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS…………………………………………………………………….... v Chapter INTRODUCTION .......................................................................................................................... 1 The “Affective Turn” ................................................................................................................. 4 Affect and the Latin American Avant-Garde: “Contentious Encounters” ................................. 9 Ambivalence: An Alternative to Avant-Garde Affect ............................................................. 16 Affect, Attention, and Artistic Creation ................................................................................... 20 Ambivalent Authorship and a “Poetics of Inattention” ............................................................ 36 CHAPTER 1: DEFERRED BEGINNINGS ................................................................................. 51 Introduction .............................................................................................................................. 51 Macedonio Fernández’s Deferred Authorship ......................................................................... 57 False Starts in Felisberto Hernández ........................................................................................ 73 Clarice Lispector and the Endless Possibilities of Beginnings ................................................ 88 Conclusion .............................................................................................................................. 100 CHAPTER 2: A POETICS OF INATTENTION ....................................................................... 102 Introduction ............................................................................................................................ 102 Mental “Blankness” in Macedonio Fernández ....................................................................... 110 Wandering Attention in Felisberto Hernández ....................................................................... 120 Attentive Capture and Release in Clarice Lispector .............................................................. 132 Conclusion .............................................................................................................................. 146 CHAPTER 3: UNFINISHED NARRATIVES ........................................................................... 148 Introduction ............................................................................................................................ 148 Literature and Life .................................................................................................................. 153 “Let something remain”: Macedonio Fernández’s Flight from Closure ................................ 160 Evasive Encounters with the Authorial Self in Felisberto Hernández ................................... 170 “I cannot finish”: Writing to Live and Writing to Die in Clarice Lispector .......................... 184 Conclusion .............................................................................................................................. 199 viii CONCLUSION: TOWARDS A POLITICS OF INATTENTION ............................................ 203 Introduction ............................................................................................................................ 203 Politics and Aesthetics ............................................................................................................ 214 Interpreting Inattention ........................................................................................................... 222 Inattentive Political Engagement in Fernández, Hernández, and Lispector ........................... 225 Writing Against Consensus: Macedonio Fernández .............................................................. 229 An “Other” Writing: Felisberto Hernández ............................................................................ 234 The “Creaturely” Writer: Clarice Lispector ........................................................................... 238 Conclusion .............................................................................................................................. 244 REFERENCES ........................................................................................................................... 248 ix INTRODUCTION This dissertation draws on recent scholarship emerging from the “affective turn”1 in literary and cultural criticism to develop new ways of approaching the writings of Macedonio Fernández (Argentina, 1874-1952), Felisberto Hernández (Uruguay,