Encounters and Crossings Among the Pseudo-Confessional, Metapoetry, and Women’s Writing: Dialogues between Ana Cristina Cesar and Sylvia Plath

Abstract

This paper proposes a critical reading of the dialogues between the poetics of Ana Cristina Cesar and Sylvia Plath, articulated around three axes: the pseudo-confessional, metapoetry, and reading memory. Through an analysis of the poems “A birthday present” and “Words”, by Sylvia Plath, and “O tempo fecha” and “sete chaves”, by Ana Cristina Cesar, the research investigates how both poets construct lyrical voices that strain the boundaries between lived experience and poetic making. Dialoguing with Rosenthal (1959) and Gilbert and Gubar (1979), I draw on the concept of the pseudo-confessional, marked by the ambiguous transparency of an “I” that performs a fabricated intimacy, in which the female body is configured as a body-territory (Grosz, 2000), subject to control yet constituting an act of resistance. In the field of metapoetry, the notion of opacity becomes central: the poem emerges as a self-reflective and protest space, where the body—through textual resources—transforms into a body-text (Françoso, 2008). The concept of reading memory (Kleiman, 1989; Halbwachs, 2006) enables an understanding of the affective and critical dialogue between the writers, especially in the poetics of Ana Cristina Cesar, a reader of Plath. Thus, this study highlights how both poets reject and subvert the patriarchal literary tradition and establish, in contemporary poetry, performative and critical discourses that ironize and, above all, challenge normativity.