Jacob Kasel is a senior who is a double major in Comparative Literature and Spanish and Portuguese. He was awarded a Summer 2018 Independent Grant which he used to conduct research on Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector's depiction of time and images and the political implications of such perception of time and images under Dr. Elissa Marder.
In my research, I aim to develop a mode of considering our perception of time and how images are key to our perception of it. To do so, I examine the work of two writers, Clarice Lispector and Marcel Proust, and one filmmaker, Andrei Tarkovsky. Doing so not only allows me to work with three languages I have studied (Portuguese, French and Russian), but also to consider how, across various cultures, artists have questioned our relation to time and to the images we use to define and conceive of it—that it is, to make time something conceivable and visible, to give it a body so to speak.
As I have focused much of my education on the Lusophone world and have previously conducted research in Brazil, I felt that completing further research in Brazil would provide me with an opportunity to improve my ability to work in an extremely complicated nation and to connect my love for Brazilian culture with issues discussed in other spaces. Importantly, this research trip alerted me to just how much research is a perpetual process that constantly challenges to question and alter our own modes of thinking and interacting with individuals and sources in a given place. When I first began my research on this trip, I entered with the goal of working with two of Lispector’s novels and aimed to focus my research on related documents in the archives I visited. When I arrived at one particular archive, the Fundação Casa de Rui Barbosa, I was alerted in a guide book to the respective archive’s fragmentary nature: that is, it does not contain a cohesive group of documents that explain one another and provide a single picture ofwho Lispector was and what her work is about. Instead it led me to shift the focus of my research to an entirely different novel and to push myself to understand what absence means—what does a lack of documents mean and how does it affect the act of interpretation?
Simultaneously, I was challenged to consider how these kinds of questions related to my own connection to Brazil. In speaking with Brazilians in variety of contexts, both academic and non-academic, I discovered that finding ways to present my own research (which in and of itself required me to deal with uncertainty rather than simply locate predetermined conclusions) presented me with a perpetual challenge. I also believe that the perpetual quality of this challenge forced me to enter into differing research spaces keeping this ambiguity in mind and to subsequently orient my communication.
Finally, in regard to my own research, I feel that that having the experience of confronting uncertainty on a daily basis in a research space, has actually helped me to consider the thematic focuses of my thesis. All three artists that I work with aimed to develop views of our relation to the world that step outside of typical modes of considering time. What this research experience has helped me to do is to hold on less to forming a given argument and finding corresponding pieces of evidence and, instead, to question why arguments often do not correspond to evidence (or the opposite—why evidence does not build specific conclusions).
Independent Grants: Visit the Undergraduate Research Programs website to learn more about applying for Independent Research Grants.
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