Clarice Lispector and William Faulkner are often described as impossible to read: too elliptical, fragmented, or interior. Yet while Faulkner was canonized by American New Critics as a paradigmatic case for close reading, the Jewish Brazilian Lispector was dismissed by Brazil's nova critica for eluding formalist analysis. This course explores the challenges these authors pose to reading itself: how have they been read, misread, or left unread? And what models of reading do they themselves embed or theorize in their fiction? Pairing their works with key texts in the history of literary criticism, we will ask what close reading makes possible - and what it cannot grasp - when confronted with radically experimental prose.
3 units · Letter or Credit/No Credit · GER: WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP
Clarice Lispector and William Faulkner are often described as impossible to read: too elliptical, fragmented, or interior. Yet while Faulkner was canonized by American New Critics as a paradigmatic case for close reading, the Jewish Brazilian Lispector was dismissed by Brazil's nova critica for eluding formalist analysis. This course explores the challenges these authors pose to reading itself: how have they been read, misread, or left unread? And what models of reading do they themselves embed or theorize in their fiction? Pairing their works with key texts in the history of literary criticism, we will ask what close reading makes possible - and what it cannot grasp - when confronted with radically experimental prose.
Offered in Winter 2026 at Stanford University.