Reified Bodies and Misplaced Identities in Elizabeth Bishop’s Narratives of Childhood Memories

Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979) starts exploring autobiographical material in her writing while living in Brazil, during the 1950s and 60s, as if diaspora enabled her to deal with issues of personal identity more openly. Focusing on the autobiographical short stories “In the Village” (1953) and “The Country Mouse” (1961), this essay looks at the representative strategies the writer chooses to portray the child protagonist’s body. Bishop’s traumatic childhood and her dislocation between borders and rural/urban landscapes (the Nova Scotia countryside and Boston) are inscribed in the protagonists’ bodily figurations, framed by a distanced narrator that highlights the tensions caused by the writer’s maternal and paternal families’ differentiated socialization practices. I will examine: i) the rhetorical strategies used by Bishop to exert formal control over her disturbing memories, namely through the reification of some of the characters’ bodies; ii) the deconstruction of the Great War victory narratives, with their strict gender distinctions. Considered the main index of personal identity in these fictional universes, the body will thus be read as a textual configuration that reflects the official discourses of citizenship in North America (Canada and the U.S.), and simultaneously resists these hegemonic proposals of identity, reclaiming its subjectivity.Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologi

Os contornos da palavra e da luz : storytelling e fotografia nos contos de Eudora Welty

Tese de doutoramento em Estudos Literários (Literatura e Cultura Norte-Americana), apresentada à Universidade de Lisboa através da Faculdade de Letras, 2007Esta dissertação pretende analisar o modo como o storytelling e a fotografia funcionam como metáforas produtivas de autoria na ficção curta de Eudora Welty. O primeiro e o segundocapítulos apresentam o contexto literário – os princípios modernistas e os seus traços particulares nos Estados Unidos da América, especialmente no Sul; o legado de diversas autoras norte-americanas na obra de Welty. Centrados em particular no ciclo de contos The Golden Apples, os capítulos seguintes vão considerar o papel criativo da comunidade feminina na diegese, como um agente discursivo que estabelece um diálogo intertextual com os enredos do heroísmo clássico e romanesco, citando fontes mitológicas, modernistas e populares. A componente visual destes sete contos será também enfatizada, considerando a sua qualidade pictórica e sugerindo paralelismos com fotografias de Welty que revelam interesses temáticos semelhantes. Vamos ainda examinar, através de imagens recorrentes de luz e sombra, o modo como a narrativa representa o processo fotográfico, que sublinha a distância entre visibilidade/inteligibilidade e a natureza misteriosa do real. Para concluir, sintetizamos a abordagem artística de Welty, que poderá ser ilustrada pela espiral da viagem – sinal da identidade em progresso característica das protagonistas femininas e dos muitos artistas que habitam a sua ficção; símbolo da dinâmica que anima tanto os seus textos ficcionais como fotográficos.This dissertation analyses how storytelling and photography work as productive metaphors of authorship in the fiction of Eudora Welty. The first and second chapters provide the literary and cultural contexts – the tenets of modernism and its distinctive traits in the United States of America, especially in the South; the legacy of several American women writers in the work of Welty. Focusing mainly on the short story cycle The Golden Apples (GA), the following chapters consider the creative role of the female community in the diegesis as a discoursive agent that engages in an intertextual dialogue with the plots of classical heroism and romantic love, quoting mythological, modernist, and popular sources. The visual component of these seven short stories will also be emphasized, considering its pictorial quality, and suggesting some parallelisms with photographies by Welty which show similar thematic concerns. In addition, we examine how the narrative figures the photographic process, through recurrent images of the confluence of light and shadow, which underline the distance between visibility/intelligibility and the mysterious nature of reality. To conclude, we will summarize Welty’s artistic approach, which may be further represented by the spiral of the journey – symbol of the identity in progress characteristic of her most representative female protagonists and of the many artists inhabiting her texts; sign of the dynamic that animates both her fictional and photographic texts.Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnolofia (FCT) ; Fundo Social Europeu no âmbito do III Quadro de Apoio Comunitári