TEMPO, MEMÓRIA E VIOLÊNCIA NO CONTO “LA ESCALERA” DE SILVINA OCAMPO

A escritora argentina Silvina Ocampo (1903-1993) representa um dos poucos nomes femininos que integram a historiografia canônica da literatura argentina. Em 1940, ela, Adolfo Bioy Casares e Jorge Luis Borges organizam a Antología de la literatura fantástica. Trata-se de uma obra de relevância para os estudos relacionados ao universo fantástico na literatura. O livro reúne contos de 65 escritores, os quais, como não é de se estranhar, apenas 4 são mulheres, entre elas está Silvina Ocampo, assim como Alexandra David Neel, Elena Garro e May Sinclair. Diante de um espaço dominado por homens, Ocampo resiste ao silenciamento o qual as mulheres são submetidas, destacando-se na produção literária do boom latino-americano. Embora grande parte dos estudos sobre a sua obra centre-se em explorar os elementos fantásticos em sua narrativa, pretende-se nesse texto observar a importância do universo feminino na sua produção, por meio do conto “La escalera”, publicado em Las invitadas (1961). Espera-se, portanto, chamar a atenção para o olhar problematizador de Silvina Ocampo no que tange à condição social da mulher, em que elementos como o tempo e a memória serão fundamentais para denunciar a situação de desigualdade social vivenciada pelas mulheres.

May Sinclair

Chapter 2 extends the previous chapter’s inquiry into the relationship between realist aesthetics and figurative language as it might be oriented towards an unimaginable term—an unknowable, noumenal category—by considering its collision with what May Sinclair posits as its psychological equivalent, the unconscious. Sinclair combined a career as a novelist with philosophical research, mounting a vindication of neo-Hegelian idealist philosophy. For Sinclair, idealism’s impetus for thinking about immaterial and unseen realities led to the intangible and unseen realms of the mind, and a metaphysical absolute becomes the conduit for her early realist novels to begin to imagine a form for the uncertain boundaries and contours of consciousness. Both lack a verifiable content and are therefore apparently beyond the power of language to define or accommodate. This chapter suggests that the models of subjectivity presented in her fiction seek to integrate a revelatory encounter with an idealist absolute with the incontrovertible material evidence of alternative forms of consciousness being presented by the ‘new psychology’.

Bringing Women Together, in Theory

“Bringing Women Together, in Theory” explores which theories allow feminist modernist scholars to treat as worthy subjects of study more women writers than just those representative few about whom most monographs have been written, thus levelling the playing field between so-called major and minor writers. In the late twentieth-century the historically tense relationship between feminist criticism’s roots in liberal humanism, even as it has had to argue against its definitional constraints, put it in conceptual tension with post-structuralist theory from which feminist theory stemmed. These differences created a contentious and hierarchical relationship in the late-twentieth century between feminist scholars of modernism from which we may now just be emerging. This chapter analyzes the work of May Sinclair and also explores affect theory, low theory, transvaluation, and skepticism.