Libros que no lo son: Crítica genética y materialidad del texto en la novela hispánica y brasileña de la segunda mitad del siglo XX

Rafael Climent Espino, Purdue University

Abstract

One of the pillars of my dissertation is the tenet that the material form that conveys a text to its readers or audience mediates the production of meaning. My dissertation is based upon the proposition that many Spanish and Latin American novels of the 20th century are questioning, through their internal structures and forms, the book as a compact object, as unique container of texts. In many ways these novels are questioning the book and its form as appropriate material support to express the meaning that the writer intended. Publishing houses demand that texts such as archives, letters, manuscripts, reports of any kind, notebooks, scripts, booklets, diaries, images, quotes, codices, handwritten notes, etc. be shaped in a traditional book form. In order to publish, writers have sometimes to conform unwillingly to the rules of the market and to pressure by publishers. I research the implications of these texts as they apply to reader reception and the meanings suggested in the form of these textual materials. My research is of significance because to this date there have been few studies undertaken on how current Spanish and Latin American writers handle textual materials in order to produce meaning for the reader. I propose that in the same way that a writer chooses a narrative voice, a time, a space, or characters to develop the text, he or she also has to choose a form, and this textual form has meaning in itself. In order to show that preoccupation with textual form is a wide phenomenon, my research focuses on five novels of different writers and countries. Still, it must be taken into consideration that they represent just a small sample of texts in which the problem of textual materials and their meaning is significant. These novels are Manuel Puig's Heartbreak Tango, a Serial (Boquitas pintadas, Folletín 1968), Clarice Lispector's Stream of Life (Água viva. Ficção, 1973), Ignácio de Loyola Brandão's Zero (1975) and Carmen Martín Gaite's Variable Cloud (Nubosidad variable, 1992). The aforementioned novels resist classification as books; rather, they could be considered "non-book texts" since not all texts are necessarily given in traditional book form. I propose the use of terms such as "novel of documents" or "material infraestructure" to describe those works built or composed by "unrelated" texts that the reader must combine in order to give them a common meaning and create his/her own fiction. Since the reader is dealing with textual materials, his/her role in these novels is active and of great importance because s/he needs to connect the threads among the different texts. Here lies the essential relation between material forms of writing and reading. So, from now on, when we read the question that brings up is whether we are reading books that hide other textual formats: "books which are not books".

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Dixon, Purdue University.

Subject Area

Modern literature|Latin American literature

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