Juan Goytisolo

by De Menezes, Alison Ribeiro

• ISBN13: 9781855661097
• ISBN10: 1855661098
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2005-06-30
• Publisher: Tamesis Books Ltd

Summary

This monograph offers two new perspectives on Spanish writer, Juan Goytisolo. First, under the themes of authorship and dissidence, it integrates his writing across several genres, providing a rounded assessment of his contribution to cultural debates in Spain since the sixties and arguing that resistance to repressive discourses characterizes his essays and autobiographies as much as his fiction. Second, it revises the prevailing critical interpretation of Goytisolo's fiction by building on four premises: that his novels are less clearly oppositional than prevailing interpretations imply; that, in order to engage with discourses of identity, he employs an idiom which, contrary to his own statements, is not a poststructuralist autonomous world of words; that a textual practice grounded in the recognizable experience of post-Civil War Spain, rather than one which seeks out the realm of pure textuality, is essential to Goytisolo's subversive political intentions; and that the autobiographical element of much of his work constitutes a more complex narrative aesthetic than has been appreciated. The book argues that if Goytisolo's work is interpreted as an ethical engagement with postmodernist theory, rather than as an illustration of it, then certain contradictions for which he has been criticized are seen in a new and valuable light. ALISON RIBEIRO DE MENEZES is a Senior Lecturer in Spanish at University College Dublin.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements	vi
Introduction: Authorship and Dissidence	1	(8)
I: THE DISSIDENT VOICE
Authoring the Self: Coto vedado and En los reinos de Taifa	9	(20)
Canonizing Dissidence: Four Decades of Essay-Writing	29	(32)
II: IDENTITY AND ALTERITY
Memory, History, and Identity: Senas de identidad and Reivindicacion del Conde don Julian	61	(30)
Migrating South, Wandering East: Juan sin Tierra and Makbara	91	(26)
III: DIVERGENCES AND CONVERGENCES
The Author as Voyeur: Paisajes despues de la batalla, La saga de los Marx, and el sitio de los sitios	117	(25)
The Author as Mystic: Las virtudes del pajaro solitario and La cuarentena	142	(27)
IV: AUTHORSHIP AND DISSIDENCE REVISITED
The Author as Intertextual Critic: Las semanas del jardin, Carajicomedia, and Telon de boca	169	(18)
Works Cited	187	(12)
Index	199