"A castaway's look": the writing of the wreck-metaphor in Catherine Pozzi's diaries
French poet and writer Catherine Pozzi is a remarkable figure of the late 19th century and the period between the World Wars. In 1893, at the age of 13, she won a little notebook from her grandmother and started a diary-writing practice she maintained until the end of her life, except for a few inte...
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| Tipo de recurso: | artículo |
| Estado: | Versión publicada |
| Fecha de publicación: | 2020 |
| País: | Brasil |
| Institución: | Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMG) |
| Repositorio: | Repositório Institucional da UFMG |
| Idioma: | inglés |
| OAI Identifier: | oai:repositorio.ufmg.br:1843/47889 |
| Acceso en línea: | http://hdl.handle.net/1843/47889 http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0164-0061 |
| Access Level: | acceso abierto |
| Palabra clave: | Self-referential discourse Metaphor Selfreflexivity Catherine Pozzi Metáfora |
| Sumario: | French poet and writer Catherine Pozzi is a remarkable figure of the late 19th century and the period between the World Wars. In 1893, at the age of 13, she won a little notebook from her grandmother and started a diary-writing practice she maintained until the end of her life, except for a few interruptions. This research stands at the intersection between intellectual history and literary studies. It is focused on the role played by the “castaway” image, developed by Pozzi as a self-reflexive construction in her diary. As a reflexive and metaphorical image, her castaway’s wreck draws from three main motifs, which are noticeable in her self-referential discourse: the sadness of an ill-fated love affair with one of the most celebrated men of French intelligentsia, namely Paul Valéry; the impact of tuberculosis on her body; and a frustrated intellectual vocation. Based on Hans Blumenberg’s views about metaphors and dialoguing with his theoretical construction, I sought to understand how a self-referential statement acts on a discourse by resorting to the textual composition of a metaphorical image, in order to be capable of representing the experience of a painfully stimulated conscience. This image emerges as an intimate and unique element, which can be interpreted as Pozzi’s entries accept the wreck image as the reflexive form of a metaphorical destiny. |
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