{"id":31,"date":"2023-03-13T17:08:24","date_gmt":"2023-03-14T00:08:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/letterstothespanishworld\/?p=31"},"modified":"2023-03-13T17:08:24","modified_gmt":"2023-03-14T00:08:24","slug":"week-9-the-question-of-gender-and-the-self-in-the-hour-of-the-star","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/letterstothespanishworld\/2023\/03\/13\/week-9-the-question-of-gender-and-the-self-in-the-hour-of-the-star\/","title":{"rendered":"Week 9: The Question of Gender and the Self in The Hour of the Star"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u00a0 \u00a0 Clarice Lispector is an author who is famous for her capricious dance between the actual and the abstraction. Through her story <\/span>The Hour of the Star <\/span><\/i>providing the semblance of a plot, she is able to cover the meaning of existence, or in her least complex, simply dive into the everyday meanderings of a disillusioned boy in his contemplation of the mundane. The title page, with its various alternate titles, suggests anxiety and flightiness on the part of the narrator who is made the author. Additionally, the gender swap of the author from girl to boy suggests a yearning to break free from established gender roles, and in fact \u201cbend\u201d them in a similar fashion to the established rules surrounding narrative plot, structure and content. \u201cI\u2019ll\u00a0 try\u00a0 contrary\u00a0 to\u00a0 my\u00a0 normal\u00a0 habits to write a story with a beginning, middle and \u2018grand finale\u2019 followed by silence and falling rain,\u201d the narrator states, revealing his breaking away from convention. At another point, he expresses his preference for \u201ca male writer\u2026because a woman would make it [the story] all weepy and maudlin.\u201d It is a thinly veiled critique of how females are viewed in literary society which is offered from, of all voices, a male constructed to espouse the sentiment. In this direct communication of intent to the reader, Lispector breaks the fourth wall and the illusion of story, and can therefore be viewed as postmodern in her approach.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0 \u00a0 Another layer to the onion is added when you consider that the author creates the man for the express purpose of having him write into existence the story of a \u201cnortheastern girl.\u201d Regardless, with the rest of the text revolving around the man, the Marshall-McLuhan medium represents him as trapped by the world around him and its manifold of bombarding messages. It is in this sense the protagonist is not completely caricaturised, instead being painted as a victim of society. \u201cHappiness? I never saw a dumber word, invented by all those northeastern girls out there\u201d is a sentiment which best represents the narrator\u2019s misogyny, yet also displays his sadness which draws from the reader some degree of sympathy. \u201cI write because I have nothing else to do in the world: I was left over and there is no place for me in the world of men,\u201d he states once more, further showcasing an age-old desire for writing as a form of escapism. The story is postmodern in the sense that the stand-in for the author\u2014another author\u2014is creating the story for the same purpose. Ironically, he only cures his writer\u2019s block on writing the girl when adding in male side characters of the young and old men\u2014I take this to reflect Lispector\u2019s belief that writing is a transmission of the self onto the page, rather than a complete fabrication.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0 \u00a0 My question for the class is: What do you believe Lispector hopes to capture in her decision to shift perspective on the opposite gender? Do you believe Clarice Lispector values honesty in her writing above all\u2014the reason for her rebuking of established norms\u2014or does she still enjoy the trickery and fooling readers <\/span>a la <\/span><\/i>Jorge Luis Borges?\u00a0<\/span>S<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0 \u00a0 Clarice Lispector is an author who is famous for her capricious dance between the actual and the abstraction. Through her story The Hour of the Star providing the semblance of a plot, she is able to cover the meaning of existence, or in her least complex, simply dive into the everyday meanderings of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":90018,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,40],"tags":[25,39,41,42],"class_list":["post-31","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-entries","category-lispector","tag-gender","tag-narrative-narration","tag-postmodern-postmodernity","tag-sex"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/letterstothespanishworld\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/letterstothespanishworld\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/letterstothespanishworld\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/letterstothespanishworld\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/90018"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/letterstothespanishworld\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/letterstothespanishworld\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":32,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/letterstothespanishworld\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31\/revisions\/32"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/letterstothespanishworld\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/letterstothespanishworld\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/letterstothespanishworld\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}