Sixteenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

Based on a cultural approach of feminine theories, which intends to define the woman-subject in relation to cultural practices and contexts (Showalter), this paper analyzes silence as a representation of the feminine in “Cidade Sitiada” by Clarice Lispector, “Lady Cottington’s Pressed Fairy Book” by Terry Jones, and “The Fox Was Ever the Hunter” by Herta Muller. Therefore, this work proposes a comparative reading of the representation of feminine discourse through the merging of two fields: cultural studies the phenomenological concept of “poetic image.” With cultural studies’ contribution to the understanding of culture as an anthropological construction and, according to Roy Wagner (2012), an “invention” and the phenomenological concept of the “poetic image” as proposed by Gaston Bachelard, this study using them a key-elements for the unveiling of the inter and transtextual dimension of the text, as well as of culture and difference.