A platform for research: civil engineering, architecture and urbanism
A platform for research: civil engineering, architecture and urbanism
Running Water in Clarice Lispector's The Besieged City
When, in Clarice Lispector's The Besieged City (1949), our protagonist, Lucrécia, contemplates her relationship with the city of São Geraldo, she pays special attention to water and water infrastructure. Pipes and embankments and viaducts, even the humble faucet – all of this technology of controlling and delivering water becomes a way of conceptualizing the city, but waterworks, I argue, is also an integral part of the text's experiment with vision. Can one see what is there? Can one see the "thing" liberated from our vocabularies? In Chapter 6, in which, supposedly, nothing is happening, Lucrécia is at the faucet, doing the dishes, losing her sense of self as she communes with the city. Later, when she notices a broken faucet in the storeroom, she confronts the thingness of this piece of equipment. To realize the thingness of herself is her most powerful desire. My analysis attempts to complicate feminist readings of The Besieged City by arguing that the text imagines objectification not as a problem, but as a paradoxical attempt at agency. Previous readings approach Lispector's novel as a condemnation of the city; my analysis understands The Besieged City as a representation of the modern sublime.
Running Water in Clarice Lispector's The Besieged City
When, in Clarice Lispector's The Besieged City (1949), our protagonist, Lucrécia, contemplates her relationship with the city of São Geraldo, she pays special attention to water and water infrastructure. Pipes and embankments and viaducts, even the humble faucet – all of this technology of controlling and delivering water becomes a way of conceptualizing the city, but waterworks, I argue, is also an integral part of the text's experiment with vision. Can one see what is there? Can one see the "thing" liberated from our vocabularies? In Chapter 6, in which, supposedly, nothing is happening, Lucrécia is at the faucet, doing the dishes, losing her sense of self as she communes with the city. Later, when she notices a broken faucet in the storeroom, she confronts the thingness of this piece of equipment. To realize the thingness of herself is her most powerful desire. My analysis attempts to complicate feminist readings of The Besieged City by arguing that the text imagines objectification not as a problem, but as a paradoxical attempt at agency. Previous readings approach Lispector's novel as a condemnation of the city; my analysis understands The Besieged City as a representation of the modern sublime.
Running Water in Clarice Lispector's The Besieged City
Lorenz, Johnny (author)
2021-11-17
doi:10.26824/lalr.265
Latin American Literary Review; Vol 48, No 97 (2021) ; 2330-135X ; 0047-4134
Article (Journal)
Electronic Resource
English
DDC:
720
Memorial Address: Clarice L. Norton
Online Contents | 1994
As a city besieged: Place, Zionism, and the deforestation of Jerusalem
| Online Contents | 2002
Urbanisation, Infrastructure and Besieged Growth Potential
| Online Contents | 1993
The Animistic Moment. Clarice Lispector, Louis Kahn and a reassembling of materialities
| DOAJ | 2016