Both in-person and Zoom tickets available.
Clarice Lispector is one of those writers who resists being approached directly. Her work is fiction, but also philosophy, prayer, interruption, argument, confession, anti-confession, animal encounter, mystic joke, domestic horror, and experiment in what happens when consciousness gets too close to itself.
This series is part reading group, part discussion, part guided encounter with one of the strangest literary consciousnesses of the twentieth century. Across three sessions, we’ll read pieces across Lispector's body of work organised around recurring themes: the self, the thing, and the voice. Each session will centre on selected passages from Lispector’s work, with optional wider reading for those who want to go deeper. You do not need to have read all of Lispector before attending, and you do not need to attend all three sessions to participate.
It will be held Wednesdays in Fitzroy North. Wednesday's, 22nd July, 29th July and the 5th August.
Session One | The Self
Wednesday 22nd July
Early Lispector, interiority, consciousness, girlhood, womanhood, becoming, unravelling. The self as trap, threshold, pressure system.
In this first session, we’ll look at Lispector’s early work and her treatment of consciousness: the feeling of being inside a self, being watched by oneself, becoming a person, resisting personhood, and thinking so intensely that the ordinary world begins to warp.
Lispector’s interiority is not soft or decorative. It is unstable, analytic, strange, sometimes violent. Her characters often appear to be having ordinary experiences — a domestic moment, a walk, a marriage, a social encounter — only for consciousness itself to become the event.
Session Two | The Thing
Wednesday 29th July
The mystical / anti-mystical Lispector. The non-human, the cockroach, the animal, God, matter, disgust, revelation, the obscene real.
This session moves into Lispector’s encounters with the non-human and the almost unsayable: animals, insects, matter, God, flesh, disgust, revelation, and the breakdown of the human self in the face of something that cannot be neatly absorbed.
This is the Lispector of the cockroach, the egg, the animal, the thing before language. Her revelations are not gentle spiritual uplift. They are often bodily, obscene, comic, annihilating, and difficult to distinguish from horror.
Session Three | The Voice
Wednesday 5th August
Later Lispector, fragmentary writing, poverty, authorship, performance, narration. The writer, the character, the interruption, the ethical problem of telling.
In the final session, we’ll turn to Lispector’s later work and the problem of voice: who speaks, who is spoken for, who is invented, and what happens when narration itself becomes ethically unstable.
This session will focus on authorship, poverty, performance, fragment, interruption, and the strange relationship between writer and character. Lispector’s late work often feels like it is undoing the novel while still needing the novel; making a voice while doubting the right to speak.
Format
Each session runs for 1.5 hours and will include a short introduction, guided close reading, group discussion, and optional reflective prompts. It will be held in Fitzroy North.
A reader will be provided before each session. The reader will include selected passages and contextual material. Full-book reading is welcome, but not required. You can come having read everything, a little, or simply arrive ready to listen and think.
This is not a formal lecture course, and no prior knowledge of Lispector or literary theory is required.
Who Is This For?
Readers, writers, artists, overthinkers, Lispector obsessives, Lispector beginners, people interested in literary strangeness, consciousness, mysticism, animals, gender, authorship, and the problem of being alive in language.
You are welcome to attend one session as a standalone event, or come to all three for the full series arc.
