Feminist Vision: Visual Art, the Act of Writing, and the Female Body in the Novels of Clarice Lispector, Lya Luft, and Diamela Eltit

Feminist Vision: Visual Art, the Act of Writing, and the Female Body in the Novels of Clarice Lispector, Lya Luft, and Diamela Eltit analyzes the metaphor of the female body as enclosed space, the themes of gender, writing, and language, and how these themes and metaphors relate to representations of figurative visual art that appear or are described within the novels. Chapter 1 ("O Corpo Quarto Corpus: Clarice Lispector, Lya Luft, and Diamela Eltit on the Body, Gender, and Writing") considers the use of the female body as architectural space in the three authors' novels and the how each author approaches the theme of meta-writing, by looking at both characters who write and also characters whose bodies serve as text and/or the ground or space of writing. Throughout, I refer to and critique various theories concerning sex, gender, and the body as they relate or conflict with Luft, Eltit, and Lispector's projects. The subsequent three chapters (Chapter 2: "The Writer as Visual Artist: Text and Graphism in Clarice Lispector's A Paixao Segundo G.H."; Chapter 3: "'Copia de um Original que Ninguem Conhecia': A 'German' Painting in Luft's O Quarto Fechado"; and Chapter 4: "Acciones de Arte" in the Public Square: Documenting and Fictionalizing State Violence in Diamela Eltit's Lumperica") analyze Lispector, Luft, and Eltit's representations of figurative visual art within the work of fiction. The critical readings of visual artwork that Lispector, Luft, and Eltit carry out in their novels present the body on both linguistic and visual levels, and as both subject and object of the gaze. This space that the characters inhabit, as well as the pictorial space of the works of art in the novels can be read as a philosophical, psychological, and social or public space. The interaction between the protagonists and the works of art provides a vision of the three authors' cultural critique of the Brazilian and Chilean societies from which they write.