With My Dog Eyes Lecture Notes PDF

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Summary

Professor Val Vinkor
Fiction: An Introduction
Spring 2022

Notes from lecture and guest Q&A about With My Dog Eyes by Hilda Hilst...

Description

With My Dog Eyes Lecture (Aaron Neber) -

Presentation thesis: “With my dog eyes is a text that is meant to shake you. In the vein of marquis de sade and georges bataille, hilst is aiming to get us to questions faiths we hold dear, faiths we hold often without even recognizing it. With my dog eyes serves to question two such faiths: the faith of the coherent self (coherent both to ourselves and also to others) and the faith in narrativity as such. That is, hilst wants us to question the avility to call ourselves into being through narrative, and also question the role of narrative in literature”

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Amos is a prophet -

Of destruction and displacement

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Amos is prophet of the hebrew bible and with my dog eyes

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Dont mean to suggest that hislt is retelling bible stoies

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Book of amos is project of death and displacement because of negelected faith, it is a remedy

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With my dog eyes is a prophet of destruction because he is meant to destroy faiths (not fix things)

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“In sum, our protagonist’s namesake suggests a prophet of death, a search for the dead in order to consume their remains, and death residing within”

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Amos is not oriented in time -

What book is about - “portrait of a man in the throes of a full mental collapse”

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Verb tense changes, is losing, was lost

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What does this do? Or what does this tell us?

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Technique is used to “pull reader in” if we are evereing a flashback

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Frequency and abruptness of these shifts seem to suggest something else

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No indication that this is a flashback

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Amos never seems to know where he is (in relation to time)

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He is confused and then so are we

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Text doesnt give us anchor to orient ourselves

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Tense slippage could reflect symptoms of descent into madness

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Past present and future are not cleanly dilineated

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Three domains are always having impact on one another

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Scene of amos in the hill, repeated 7 times

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One thing to notice is some are in 1st and some are in 3rd person

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Described as “clear cut unhoped for” “incommensurable meaning” “beautiful nonobvious” “invades” amos

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Amos is mathematician, incommesurable is a rupture of amos’ life work

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Conclusion: “constructing a life, whether a figure in a novel or one’s own life, in the form of a story - with a standard approach to temporality - means attempting to overcome or master a chaotic frenzy that resists simplistic organization”

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Amos is not oriented in self -

Temporality is implied in the verbs

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Books refuses to let us get our bearings regarding perspective (shifts constantly)

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No quotation marks, lack of grammatical marking helps fuel confusion of who is speaking or thinking when

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Slips into different perspectives in the middle of stories

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What is going on in these scenes?

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We never really have a 3rd person point of view

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Lines that appear in 3rd person is amos’ fracturing mind, speaking of himself in the third person

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Amos is rejected with the “I” with which he shares a body -

What does it mea that amos is rejected by the “I”?

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Final scene isn’t one of death or disappearence

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Expulsion of a persona created to organize chaos

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“I” has recognized its own incomprehensibility

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Attempts to grasp “incommensurable truths” cannot be accomplished through a “story”

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Rejection of narrativized self, rejection of self transparency

“If this analysis is right, and Hilst’s version of the self is fractured, schizoid, and incomprehensible, does this mean that to have a coherent sense of self we must remain in some regard - tethered to the institutions Lispector and Hilst are both contending with (in different ways)?

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Things uncovered -

The title

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sex/uality?

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The sow named “hilde”?

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Animals in general?

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Presence of Isaiah?

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Hilst’s relation to shifts in brazilian politics in the 60s and 80s?...