L'A. mesure le role culturel et politique du roman dans la formation de l'imaginaire social des nations, dans l'ouvrage de B. Anderson consacre aux «Communautes imaginaires» (1983). L'A. examine la structure formelle du point de vue narratif, le contenu national de la fiction, ainsi que la construction du lecteur, qui participent a la representation de l'identite d'une nation.

Anderson and the Novel

Acknowledgments Preamble 1. The Case of the Speaking Statue: Ariel and the Magisterial Rhetoric of the Latin American Essay 2. Dona Barbara Writes the Plain 3. The Dictatorship of Rhetoric/The Rhetoric of Dictatorship 4. Terra Nostra: Theory and Practice 5. Los reyes: Cortazar's Mythology of Writing 6. Biografia de un cimarron and the Novel of the Cuban Revolution 7. Literature and Exile: Carpentier's \"Right of Sanctuary\" \"Meta-End,\" by Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Translated, with an Introduction, Commentary, and Notes Notes Index

The Voice of the Masters: Writing and Authority in Modern Latin American Literature

Fernando del Paso (b.1935) is one of Mexico's most prestigious living authors. In this first book-length comparative study, Robin W. Fiddian evaluates Del Paso's relationships to Mexican, Spanish American, European and North American narrative traditions, palcing him in the context of other Latin American writers like Fuentes, Cortazar and Garcia Marquez. Looking in particular at the pattern of evolution of four novels - \"Jose Trigo\", \"Palinuro de Mexico\", \"Noticias del Imperio\" and \"Linda 67\", Fiddian argues that the works demonstrate the triumph of a modernist style of writing in Spanish American fiction of the midcentury and its subsequent eclipse by postmodern paradigms. Fiddian also addresses issues of cultural identity and independence that are revelant both within and beyond the national boundaries of Mexico. As well as providing the most comprehensive coverage yet of Del Paso's impressive writing, the book can be read as a case study of the application of postmodern and postcolonial theories to the literary cultures of all developing nations.

The Novels of Fernando del Paso

Reader response and reader reception theories of the twentieth-century have left one area of research curiously unexamined—readers. From the Russian Formalists (Victor Shklovksy), to the Constance school (Hans Robert Jauss and Wolfgang Iser), to the poststructuralists (Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida), the focus of theorists has always been on texts and the characteristics that define their literariness. Readers—in actuality, a multitude of real individuals with various aptitudes, experiences and tastes—have been abstracted into “the reader,” a hypothetical everyman. As such, a vast section on the spectrum of possible reader responses, which may include interest, intrigue and enjoyment, but also frustration, boredom and annoyance, has been regretfully ignored in the discipline of literary studies. Texts that present readers with difficulties—either linguistic or logical—highlight especially well the wide array of possible reader responses, for experimental art (whether visual or written) sets out to defy expectations, aiming precisely to incite controversy and divide opinions. This dissertation therefore takes up works published in the late 1960s and early 1970s that are known for their difficult, experimental styles and studies how readers respond to them, taking particular interest in the cognitive processes that are involved in the act of reading. Under the lens are Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, John Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse, Julio Cortázar’s Rayuela and Macedonio iii Fernández’s El Museo de la novela de la Eterna . To consider the impact of readers’ expectations surrounding genre, responses to Jacques Derrida’s De la grammatologie, a text of theory that employs similar formal games, are also compared. Numerous advances in the cognitive sciences over the past two decades have granted previously unfathomable insights into the functioning of the human brain where language and reading are concerned. The purpose of this thesis is twofold: 1) to promote a new framework for the study of reader response that is informed by the cognitive sciences; and 2) to acknowledge that texts elicit various responses from readers and thus argue that cognitive factors such as attention, long-term and working memory and emotions, as well as readers’ expectations of coherency, shape these responses.

/pdf/understanding-difficulty-reader-response-and-cognition-2d20n9e82g.pdf

Understanding Difficulty: Reader Response and Cognition Across Genres

The Social Function of Carlos Fuentes: A Critical Intellectual or in the ‘Shadow of the State’?

The recent fiction of Spanish America has been widely acclaimed for its experimental and revolutionary qualities. In Reclaiming the Author, Lucille Kerr studies the sources of power of this newly emergent literature in her detailed examination of the critical concept of "the author." Kerr considers how Spanish American narratives raise questions about authorial identity and activity through the different figures of the author they propose. These author-figures, she maintains, both complement and contradict notions of authority that exist outside of the world of fiction. By focusing on works by well-known Spanish American authors-Cortazar, Donoso, Fuentes, Poniatowska, Puig, and Vargas Llosa-Kerr shows how the Spanish Americans have formed a radical poetics of the author. Her readings demonstrate how exemplary Spanish American texts, such as Rayuela, Terra nostra, and El hablador, call into question the author as a unitary or uniform, and therefore unproblematical, figure. Individually and together, Kerr's readings reclaim "the author" as a complex critical concept encompassing diverse, conflicting, even competitive roles.

Reclaiming the Author: Figures and Fictions from Spanish America

How do we read a text that lies? How do we read a text that, somehow, persuades us to believe what it says, though we suspect that it doesn't really tell the whole truth? Documentary fictionand especially the Spanish American novela testimonial-raises these familiar questions.' Though they are questions that may well occur to us as we read any work of fiction, they are also questions we may be likely to disregard. However, the novela testimonial would push us to reconsider these queries, and to see them perhaps as meaningful rather than as marginal issues toward

Lucille Kerr

Papers

Reclaiming the Author: Figures and Fictions from Spanish America

Gestures of Authorship: Lying to Tell the Truth in Elena Poniatowska’s Hasta no verte Jesús mío

Suspended Fictions: Reading Novels by Manuel Puig

Suspended Fictions: Reading Novels by Manuel Puig

Authority in Play: José Donoso's El jardín de al lado