The Poetics of Less:

Refusal, Loss, and Death in Literature

Abstract

This article undertakes a critical examination of the representation of loss, negation, and death in literature, focusing on the works of Elizabeth Bishop, Clarice Lispector, and Carlos Drummond de Andrade, while engaging in intermedial dialogue with other artistic expressions. Through diverse poetic and narrative strategies, these authors articulate a sustained inquiry into the experience of finitude—whether in the form of death, the loss of the other, or the dissolution of the self. Structured around a tripartite axis—the aesthetics of loss in Bishop, existential dispersion in Lispector, and the poetics of negation in Drummond—the analysis foregrounds how these texts mobilize absence as a generative principle. Drawing upon critical theory, the article situates the notion of “the less” within a broader dialectic of negative production, arguing that these literary practices displace teleological understandings of the end and, instead, produce meaning through fragmentation, attenuation, and refusal. Loss, thus, emerges as both aesthetic method and philosophical stance.