Katerina Blasques Kaspar

Katerina Blasques Kaspar is a doctoral candidate in Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of São Paulo (Brazil). She holds a Master’s degree from the same institution, focused on Paloma Vidal’s literary project Não escrever and its relationship to the thought of Roland Barthes. Her thesis examined Vidal’s literary approach, in which the book is conceived as “outside-itself” (hors-soi), and literature engages in dialogue with other artistic forms, particularly performance and photography. Her current doctoral research explores the notion of community within a selected corpus of works by Cristina Rivera Garza, Paloma Vidal, and Sophie Calle. She is supervised by Professor Claudia Amigo Pino (USP) and co-supervised by Professor Magali Nachtergael (Université Bordeaux-Montaigne).

She is a member of the editorial boards of the Brazilian academic journals Criação e Crítica and Manuscrítica, and also serves on the Executive Committee of the Associação dos Pesquisadores em Crítica Genética (Brazil). Her research interests include “expanded literature” (littérature hors-soi), the relationship between literature and performance, contemporary literature as a whole, and the connections between French and Latin American literary practices.

The project

Title: Sophie Calle’s Archive: An Analysis of Creative Process Documents in Douleur exquise and Prenez soin de vous

"This proposed research internship, as part of an international doctoral program, is embedded within the ongoing doctoral project entitled Modes of Literary Creation in Conviviality, funded by the CAPES Academic Excellence Program (88887.920522/2023-00). The research investigates the notion of community in the works of Sophie Calle, Cristina Rivera Garza, and Paloma Vidal. Drawing on theoretical discussions of community that have emerged over recent decades—particularly Roland Barthes’ lecture series How to Live Together (1976–1977) at the Collège de France, and Jean-Luc Nancy’s works such as The Inoperative Community (1986), The Disavowed Community (2001), and The Unavowable Community (2014)—the project explores how these ideas manifest in the literary practices of the selected corpus. The works under study include Pré-historia (2020) and La banda oriental (2021) by Paloma Vidal; Autobiografía del Algodón (2020), Andamos perras, andamos diablas (2021), and El invencible verano de Liliana (2021) by Cristina Rivera Garza; and Douleur exquise (2003) and Prenez soin de vous (2007) by Sophie Calle. To date, the research has revealed that the notion of community is closely linked to certain creative practices shared by the three authors, such as interdisciplinary approaches to artistic production and the creation of archives that encompass both the process and the final work. In the case of Sophie Calle—a French visual artist, writer, and photographer, best known for Suite Vénitienne (1983) and Douleur exquise (2003)—her work demonstrates the use of procedures that perform ethnographic practice and adopt the stance of an archivist."

Hosting institution: Université Bordeaux-Montaigne

Selective Bibliography

• KASPAR, K. B.. Um livro de papelão: as editoras cartoneras em contexto latino-americano. Revista Dobra (Portugal), v. 14, p. 50-62, 2024.
• KASPAR, K. B.. O estar em comum de Cristina Rivera Garza. REVISTA CRIAÇÃO & CRÍTICA, v. 1, p. 118-131, 2023.
• KASPAR, K. B.. « Tenho medo, logo vivo? » : Roland Barthes em Não escrever, de Paloma Vidal. REVISTA CRIAÇÃO & CRÍTICA, v. I, p. 160-180, 2021.
• KASPAR, K. B.. Um romance não escrito, uma viagem não realizada: Roland Barthes por Paloma Vidal, em Não escrever. v. I, p. 43-63, 2021.
• KASPAR, K. B.. Quando não escrevemos, escrevemos: a performance na escrita de si. OPINIÃES - REVISTA DOS ALUNOS DE LITERATURA BRASILEIRA, v. 9, p. 17-40, 2020.