UC Santa Barbara

This dissertation connects three Brazilian writers: Machado de Assis (1839-1908), Clarice Lispector (1920-1977), and João Guimarães Rosa (1908-1967), and considers literary representations of animals across their works. The dissertation pays particular attention to the conception of the animal and argues that these animals’ formulations help us under-stand the ethical stances that these authors took, the awareness of the limits between the human and the non-human, and the foundation of a type of literature that escapes the anthropocentric canon.In the first chapter, I argue that writer Machado de Assis was a pioneer in debating animal treatment in some of his chronicles and short stories; this is contextualized by the vegetarian movement that was then beginning to emerge in Brazilian society. In the chapter devoted to Clarice Lispector’s fiction, I defend that Lispector innovatively incorporates animals in her work, using mechanisms to formulate an awareness of the limits between humans and non-humans. In the concluding chapter, which centers on Guimarães Rosa, I claim that in some of Rosa’s short stories, there is a dialogue that, in certain aspects, approaches the Amerindian Perspectivism, conceptualized by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro years later.