OLAGN Graduate Seminar Series: “Disgust, dissolution, and the transcendence of the female body in Clarice Lispector’s novel The Passion According to G.H.”

Speaker: Sabine Erbrich (Freie Universität Berlin / University of Oxford)

Discussant: Professor Claire Williams (University of Oxford)

Sabine Erbrich is a doctoral student in Comparative Literature at Freie Universität Berlin. Currently, she is a Recognised Student at the University of Oxford’s Faculty of English. She is also working as an editor for foreign fiction at Suhrkamp Verlag. She holds a MA in Romance Languages Literatures (Freie Universität Berlin), and a BA in German-Hispanic Studies (Universities of Regensburg and Complutense Madrid).

This paper is part of a doctoral thesis that explores disgust in contemporary literature written by women. While the works of male authors focusing on disgust and ennui before World War II have been extensively studied, literature on disgust by female, queer, and marginalized writers remains largely overlooked. This thesis seeks to address this gap. Clarice Lispector’s 1964’s novel The Passion According to G.H. explicitly engages with the motive of disgust, most famously symbolized by the female narrator’s eating of a cockroach. Analysing the connections between language and expression, and the representation of the female body, this paper provides a novel perspective on disgust and its impact on literary form.