Writing from Home: Clarice Lispector’s Chronicles in the Jornal do Brasil

Abstract

This article focuses on Clarice Lispector’s chronicles published in the Jornal do Brasil from 1967-1973. These chronicles become a public space for exposing the act of thinking, which is strongly linked to emotions, instead of depicting a daily overview of events for the newspaper’s readers. Drawing from Bruno Latour’s notions of “translation” and “purification,” I argue that there is a “translation” process in Lispector’s chronicles that goes against “purification practices.” To this effect, I focus on how Lispector displays both her thinking process and her emotions, and on the role of things and people in her writing. Lispector delves into life from her home, an environment that becomes an “epistemological space,” as defined by Stacy Alaimo.