unfolded muse: paths from the self to the other in the works of Adalgisa Nery

Abstract

Admired by Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Murilo Mendes and Jorge de Lima, Adalgisa Nery became muse of a circle of artists who attended the house of the painter Ismael Nery. At the same time, her life story and work culminate with a self-imposed silence until her death. Such isolation of Adalgisa in a nursing home in Jacarepaguá can sometimes be thought of not only as a choice for withdrawal from society – in which she exercised a political career, interrupted in 1960 by the cancellation of her term – but as a misunderstanding of her work, a kind of feminine and feminist portrait of a Brazilian modern intellectual. At this crossroad between the auratic cult of the Muse and the unique voice of the poet and fiction writer, her work will be analyzed from a fundamental theme of her writing: the unstable and complex transits between the self-construction of an own poetic voice – and the other, embodied outside of the world or as a body figuration as matter foreign to the spirit.