Múltiples lectores implícitos

Publicado en Cuadernos de Investigación Filológica, XXXV-XXXVI (2009-2010), p. 63-75.

This paper reflects on the concept of the implied reader in narrative fiction, with special reference to Walker Gibson and Wayne Booth's original conception, and to Brian Richardson's recent work on multiple implied readers. The fuzziness of the concept of the implied reader, and its tendency to multiply, is shown to be related to the diverse interactional and interpretive uses of the texts.


Este artículo reflexiona sobre el concepto de lector implícito en la ficción narrativa, con referencia especial al concepto originario de Walker Gibson y Wayne Booth, y al reciente trabajo de Brian Richardson sobre la multiplicidad de lectores implícitos. Se muestra cómo los límites difusos del concepto de lector implícito, y la tendencia del mismo a multiplicarse, son fenómenos relacionados con los diferentes usos interaccionales y hermenéuticos de los textos.

Review of Nicholas Ray's TRAGEDY AND OTHERNESS

Published in MISCELÁNEA: A JOURNAL OF ENGLISH AND AMERICAN STUDIES vol. 44 (2011): 167-73.

A review of Nicholas Ray's book TRAGEDY AND OTHERNESS: SOPHOCLES, SHAKESPEARE, PSYCHOANALYSIS (Peter Lang, 2009). The book offers a poststructuralist / psychoanalytic reading of OEDIPUS THE KING, JULIUS CAESAR, and HAMLET, as well as a reworking of Freud's insights on tragedy from a perspective informed by the work of Jean Laplanche and an emphasis on the experience of otherness.

Tragedia y dinámica de fuerzas

Se percibe una relación entre la dinámica de fuerzas de la tragedia shakespeareana, según el análisis de A. C. Bradley, y los análisis de la estructura semántica de la causalidad en argumentos verbales o construcciones preposicionales, tal como los analizan los lingüistas cognitivos Steven Pinker y Len Talmy. Estructuras lingüísticas y textuales a diversos niveles de complejidad se basan en esquemas cognitivos comparables que permiten interpretar la acción, los procesos y relaciones, y la experiencia, mediante su representación esquemática.

Podrás probar, de este libro, este saber (Shakespeare, Soneto 77)

Comentario, en español, del Soneto 77 de Shakespeare, con especial atención al análisis de las imágenes, y a la dimensión reflexiva del poema. El soneto 77 articula una poética personal que combina la lectura, la escritura, la experiencia del paso del tiempo, y la relectura interpretativa, entendidos como parte del proceso hacia el autoconocimiento y la comprensión de la realidad humana.
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This is a commentary, in Spanish of Shakespeare's Sonnet 77, with special attention to the analysis of imagery and to the reflexive dimension of the poem. Sonnet 77 formulates a personal poetics which combines reading, writing, the experience of time passage, and interpretive rereading, understood as a path towards self-knowledge and insight into the human condition

Cognición retrospectiva, intertextualidad e interpretación: Un símbolo en 'Navidad' de Nabokov

"Hindsight, Intertextuality, and Interpretation: A Symbol in Nabokov's 'Christmas'." Published in SYMBOLISM: An International Annual of Critical Aesthetics (New York: AMS Press), 5 (2005): 267-94. English text at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1624262

Este artículo examina la significación del simbolismo de la mariposa en el relato de Vladimir Nabokov ’Navidad’ ('Christmas', trad. de 'Rozhdestvo', 1925), a la luz de una teoría interaccionista de la interpretación. Se muestra cómo los elementos intertextuales emergen a través de un proceso de debate crítico, relectura e interacción discursiva, a medida que se van estableciendo gradualmente la importancia y significación cultural de un texto. El enfoque crítico de este artículo intenta combinar las percepciones del análisis del discurso, de la hermenéutica narrativa y de la pragmática literaria.

Narratology: an introduction

Reseña (no mía, sino anónima o de un autor que no he identificado) del libro NARRATOLOGY, editado por Susana Onega y José Angel García Landa (Addison Wesley Longman, 1996).

El autor implícito y el narrador no fiable—según nuestro punto de vista

Implied authors and unreliable narrators—from our point of view

Expongo aquí mi punto de vista sobre dos figuras textuales estrechamente relacionadas en la ficción narrativa: el autor implícito y el narrador no fiable. Son dos conceptos narratológicos que surgieron asociados a la obra de Wayne Booth, y que han tenido suertes diferentes en narratología: el autor implícito se bate en retirada en tanto que concepto teórico, en tanto que el narrador no fiable, adquiere un protagonismo casi imperialista, aun a costa del que podría parecer su correlativo necesario. Con alguna nota histórica intentaré mostrar que no es tan fácil librarse del autor implícito—y reiteraré su necesidad para una definición adecuada del narrador no fiable.

Overhearing Narrative

Published in The Dynamics of Narrative Form: Studies in Anglo-American Narratology. Ed. John Pier. (Narratologia: Contributions to Narrative Theory / Beiträge zur Erzähltheorie, 4). Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2004. 191-214.

Reading literary narratives involves interpreting and articulating a number of complex hierarchical structures of communicative address. Some of these interactive processes may be further examined on the basis of an analogy with oral or conversational narrative. The extension, coherence and referential autonomy of narratives favour the generation of elaborate textual images of senders and addressees. These textual subjects of written narratives are built on potentialities which are already present in conversational narrative, whereas the specific constraints and possibilities of written language and of literary conventions make possible the development of more complex forms. A special sense of "overhearing" as applied to written narratives will have to be defined to account for some such complex effects. An analysis of such phenomena will require an approach through the pragmatic specificity of narrative fiction and of the modes of address involved in it.

Narrating Narrating: Twisting the Twice-Told Tale

Published in the book THEORIZING NARRATIVITY. Ed. John Pier and José Ángel García Landa. (Narratologia, 12). Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2008. 419-51.

There is a structural/genetic continuity between everyday oral narrative and elaborate literary narratives, with listeners gradually becoming an audience. Literary stories which narrate some character's oral narrating keep us aware of this continuity, and build bridges between advanced literate and oral forms, reappropriating orality for literature, and constructing advanced interactional forms precisely through a return, with a difference, to the origins of narrative interaction. The paper examines some aspects of oral narration in written fiction, and suggests the general proposition that retelling is a crucial concept in narrative analysis, as narratives always retell earlier narratives.

Tematización retroactiva, interacción e interpretación: La espiral hermenéutica de Schleiermacher a Goffman

Texto publicado en el el libro "Hans-Georg Gadamer: Ontología estética y hermenéutica." Ed. Teresa Oñate y Zubía, Cristina García Santos y Miguel Ángel Quintana Paz. Madrid: Dykinson, 2005. 679-88.

Explora este trabajo algunas de las intersecciones entre el estudio de la interacción lingüística y el de la interpretación literaria, e investiga para ello ciertas analogías entre la hermenéutica de Schleiermacher, la de Gadamer, el dialogismo de Bajtín, la teoría interpretativa postestructuralista y el estudio pragmalingüístico de la interacción comunicativa propuesto por Goffman. Describimos la continuidad existente entre, por una parte, los modos de reelaboración intertextual adecuados al debate crítico, y por otra, la interacción entre la comunicación verbal y la no verbal descrita por los pragmatistas. Se saca en consecuencia que la lectura crítica, al igual que hacen los turnos conversacionales, podrá proporcionar tanto una 'respuesta' como una 'contestación' al texto que se esté analizando.

Literature in Internet

Lecture at the International Conference on Internet and Language ICIL'05. Castellón de la Plana: Universitat Jaume I, 27 Oct. 2005. Published as chapter seven of THE TEXTURE OF INTERNET: NETLINGUISTICS IN PROGRESS, ed. Santiago Posteguillo, María José Esteve and M. Lluïsa Gea-Valor (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007). Short version of "Linkterature: From Word to Web".

This paper offers a perspective on the Internet and literature interface, with a special focus on the issue of intertextuality, in an attempt to delimit those issues specific to networked literature, as against digital or hypertextual literature. I focus on literature as a family of medium-conditioned discursive practices, and examine the consequences of digital networks for a redefinition of these practices. These consequences will be approached from four viewpoints: a perspective on the Internet as literature, and of literature as an Internet: together with an examination of literature in the Internet, and of the Internet in literature. Among the topics addressed will be issues of interactivity, the blogosphere, postmodernist fiction, and the cyborganization of social communication.

Recent Literary Theory and Criticism in Spanish Anglistics: Some Observations on Its Institutional Context and Practices

Published in Links and Letters 8 (2001)

This paper addresses the institutional context and academic practices related to the production and use of literary theory and criticism in the Spanish universities, with a special focus on the role of theory in Spanish Anglistics in recent years. The paper assesses interdisciplinary communication, the impact of new theoretical paradigms (feminism, postcolonial Studies, etc.) in a specifically Spanish setting, and the disciplinary transformations and new publishing opportunities associated to the new media ecology. Close attention is paid to issues of cultural colonization, disciplinary marginality and the contextual roots of academic praxis.

Lenguaje y 'différance' en EL INNOMBRABLE

Ponencia presentada en las II Jornadas de Lengua y Literatura Inglesas (Colegio Universitario de La Rioja, Logroño, 1990). Publicada en las Actas de las II Jornadas de Lengua y Literatura. Logroño: Colegio Universitario de La Rioja, Departamento de Filología Inglesa y Alemana, 1992. 69-83.

Sigue este trabajo la pista de ciertas analogías entre la escritura experimental y reflexiva de Samuel Beckett, por una parte, y el pensamiento de Jacques Derrida por la otra. Esbozamos una lectura postestructuralista de El Innombrable y una interpretación de la escritura beckettiana como práctica discursiva materialista, desconstructiva y eminentemente intertextual.

A Comparison between the French and RP English Vowel Systems

Undergraduate paper, written in 1983.

This is a paper in comparative phonology, which undertakes a detailed comparative analysis of the standard British English RP (Received Pronunciation) vowel system, and that of standard French, including some observations on regional varieties.

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Título en español: "Comparación entre los sistemas vocálicos francés e inglés RP." Se trata de un trabajo de fonología comparada, entre el sistema vocálico del inglés británico estándar (RP, "received pronunciation") y el del francés (estándar, con algunos apuntes sobre variedades regionales).

Reseña de THE MOOR'S LAST SIGH, de Salman Rushdie

Publicada en Miscelánea 16 (1995): 222-26.

Reseña de la novela de Salman Rushdie THE MOOR'S LAST SIGH / EL ÚLTIMO SUSPIRO DEL MORO (1995).

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A review (in Spanish) of Salman Rushdie's novel THE MOOR'S LAST SIGH (1995).

Por la Galaxia Gutenberg (The Surfer's Guide)

Reseña retrospectiva y crítica del libro de Marshall McLuhan LA GALAXIA GUTENBERG (1962), un texto clásico de los estudios mediáticos, que versa sobre el impacto cognitivo y comunicativo de los medios de comunicación, la imprenta como el primer medio de comunicación de masas, y la revolución de las comunicaciones electrónicas en el siglo XX. Presto especial atención a la relevancia de las ideas de McLuhan para la comunicación en red, páginas web, blogs, etc., así como a las limitaciones de sus planteamientos desde la perspectiva actual.

El modo del género narrativo: diversas interpretaciones

Publicado originalmente en Miscelánea 7 (Zaragoza, 1986): 61-67.

Este trabajo versa sobre el modo narrativo en la representación literaria, una cuestión presente ya en los textos sobre poética y semiótica de Platón y de Aristóteles. Entendemos aquí por “modo” en sentido amplio la mayor o menor filtración de la información narrativa a través de la actividad del narrador, siguiendo la analogía macroestructual con el modo verbal introducida por Genette. Al comparar distintas teorías de la narración contemporáneas, observamos una serie de recurrencias a la hora de oponer modos de presentación de la historia directos, inmediatos o “dramáticos” a modos de representación más distanciadores, que ofrecen la información narrativa al lector de una manera ya más procesada o unívoca, y presentamos una clasificación preliminar.

Out of Character: Narratología del sujeto y su trayectoria vital

Publicado en el libro "Los Caminos de la Lengua: Estudios en homenaje a Enrique Alcaraz Varó." Ed. J. L. Cifuentes, A. Gómez, A. Lillo, J. Mateo y F. Yus. (Publicaciones de la Universidad de Alicante, 2010, p. 1053-1063.

Tratamos en este artículo sobre la relevancia de los conceptos narratológicos, desarrollados en el marco del análisis literario, para el estudio y la representación de la experiencia vital personal y la psicología narrativa. Los hallazgos de la psicología narrativa proporcionan una nueva comprensión de la retroalimentación hermenéutica que se da entre la experiencia vital y su representación literaria o narrativa. Apuntamos diversas variantes y dimensiones de las historias vitales personales, y subrayamos la importancia en ellas del anclaje narrativo, así como de las transformaciones, las crisis y los puntos de inflexión.

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This paper argues the relevance of narratological concepts developed in literary analysis for the study and representation of personal life experience and narrative psychology. The findings of narrative psychology give new insights into the hermeneutic feedback between life and literature, or life and narrative. Several varieties and dimensions of personal life stories are sketched, and the importance of narrative anchoring, as well as of transformations, crises and turning points is emphasized.

Nivel narrativo, status, persona, y tipología de las narraciones

Artículo publicado en Miscelánea: A Journal of English and American Studeis 17 (1996): 91-121.

Se estudian en este trabajo diversos aspectos de la estructuración narrativa relacionados entre sí por la problemática común de la enunciación de ficción, su representación y su tratamiento específico en un género complejo como la narración literaria. Por ejemplo, la definición del autor-narrador es de gran complejidad teórica. Se presuponen en ella formas de narración estructuralmente más simples, como la narración homodiegética y la narración heterodiegética ficticia; la definición de ésta, a su vez, presupone la narración heterodiegética factual. Es decir, el narrador, al menos en uno de sus roles, está realizando actos de habla, que se interpretan comunicativamente. El elemento de comunicación está implícito en la estructura de la narración ficticia, aunque otros se le hayan superpuesto. Señalamos, pues, en nuestro análisis algunas de las estructuras enunciativas que han de tenerse en cuenta para una caracterización semiótica de los diversos planos del relato literario. Que la narración literaria sea tan compleja estructuralmente es una indicación de su complejidad funcional y pragmática.

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This paper addresses several aspects of narrative structuring related to the fictional enunciation, its representation, and its specific treatment in a complex genre such as literary narrative. For instance, the theoretical definition of the authorial narrator is highly complex. It rests on the assumption of other structurally simpler narrative modes, such as homodiegetic narrative and fictional heterodiegetic narrative; the definition of the latter, in turn, rests on the definition of factual heterodiegetic narrative. That is to say, the narrator, at least in one of his roles, is performing communicative speech acts which are to be interpreted as such. This communicative dimension is implicit in the structure of fictional narrative, although other layerings may have been superposed. Therefore our analysis points out some of the enunciative structures which must be taken into account in a semiotic characterization of the diverse planes of literary narratives. Such structural complexity of literary narrative is indicative of its functional and pragmatic complexity.

Enunciación, ficción y niveles semióticos en el texto narrativo

Publicado en Miscelánea 15 (1994): 263-300.

En este trabajo estableceremos algunos paralelismos entre conceptos narratológicos y otros derivados de la pragmalingüística, con la esperanza de que esta comparación contribuya a clarificar las relaciones entre dos disciplinas tan próximas y que a la vez han trabajado tan aisladas. Dado que el tema desborda con mucho el tratamiento que aquí podemos darle, nos centraremos ante todo en las peculiaridades enunciativas de la ficción. Examinaremos algunas definiciones clásicas de la ficción en el campo de la teoría literaria y la teoría de los actos de habla. Partiendo de ellas, estableceremos pautas de descripción estructural que tengan en cuenta la naturaleza compleja y estratificada de la ficción narrativa, teniendo en cuenta los casos fronterizos o problemáticos. Terminaremos con unas consideraciones sobre las relaciones entre la lingüística ampliada (pragmalingüística) y la teoría literaria.

Review of "Recent Trends in Narratological Research"

Review of "Recent Trends in Narratological Research: Papers from the Narratology Round Table ESSE 4, September 1997, Debrecen, Hungary, and Other Contributions." Ed. John Pier. (GRAAT - Groupe de Recherches Anglo-Américaines de Tours, 21). Tours: Groupe de Recherches Anglo-Américaines de l'Université François Rabelais de Tours, 1999. Review published in Miscelánea 22 (2000): 215-22.
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Reseña, en inglés, del volumen "Recent Trends in Narratological Research: Papers from the Narratology Round Table ESSE 4, September 1997, Debrecen, Hungary, and Other Contributions." Ed. John Pier. (GRAAT - Groupe de Recherches Anglo-Américaines de Tours, 21). Tours: Groupe de Recherches Anglo-Américaines de l'Université François Rabelais de Tours, 1999. Reseña publicada en Miscelánea 22 (2000): 215-22.

This is a review of the volume "Recent Trends in Narratological Research: Papers from the Narratology Round Table ESSE 4, September 1997, Debrecen, Hungary, and Other Contributions", ed. John Pier (GRAAT - Groupe de Recherches Anglo-Américaines de Tours, 21), Tours: Groupe de Recherches Anglo-Américaines de l'Université François Rabelais de Tours, 1999. This review of the theories put forward by this group of European narratologists calls for a greater integreation of narratology on the one hand with ideological criticism, and on the other with linguistics. It points out some of the main concepts which, while they are questioned by some contemporary narratologists, are crucial in order to allow for a circulation and a continuity between narratology, criticism, and linguistic pragmatics—e.g. the concept of the implied author. E.g., A. Nünning's cognitivist reformulation of the concept of the implied author is rejected as insufficient to account for the communicative effects (irony, etc.) and the interpretive consequences attending the use of unreliable narrators. A number elements of abstract and idealistic formalism which are to be found in some of the propounded models of analysis are also criticized.

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En nuestra revisión de las concepciones de este grupo de narratólogos europeos abogamos por una narratología más integrada con la crítica ideológica por una parte y con la lingüìstica por otra, y señalamos algunos de los conceptos fundamentales que, siendo cuestionados por algunos narratólogos actuales, son cruciales para mantener abierta la comunicación entre narratología, crítica y pragmalingüística: por ejemplo, el concepto del autor implícito. Rechazamos a este respecto la reformulación cognitivista de Ansgar Nünning por insuficiente para explicar los efectos comunicativos (ironía, etc.) e interpretativos que rodean al uso del narrador no fiable. También criticamos los elementos de formalismo abstracto e idealista que se encuentran en algunos de los modelos propuestos.

Reading Racism: The Assumption of Authorial Intentions in Stephen Crane's 'The Monster'

Published in Miscelánea 10 (Zaragoza, 1989): 63-80.

This paper derives from an M.A. dissertation on Stephen Crane ("Reading 'The Monster'," Brown University, 1989). It examines the critical reception of Stephen Crane's story 'The Monster', with a special focus on the issue of racial representation and on the way authorial intentions bearing on this issue are constructed by critics. The critical approach expands narratological analysis in the direction of the sociology of literature, in this case through reception aesthetics. Focusing on racial representations and attitudes, the paper upholds the relevance of authorial intention as a critical concept, understanding criticism as a specific discursive discipline or "language game", on the basis of the continual use critics make of this concept in order to make sense of the works they read. At the same time, the limits of such intentions are shown to be ideologically determined in the critical act. Interpretation emerges, therefore, as an interactive practice which is often blind to the discursive conventions that enable it.

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Este artículo (derivado de la tesis "Reading 'The Monster'", Brown University, 1989) se centra en la recepción crítica del relato de Stephen Crane, en particular sobre la cuestión de la representación racial y de las interpretaciones críticas que se hacen de las intenciones del autor a este respecto. El trabajo extiende la narratología en dirección a la sociología, en este caso a través de la estética de la recepción. Tomando como ocasión la representación racial, afirmamos la relevancia del concepto de intención autorial dentro de la crítica entendida como una disciplina discursiva o “juego lingüístico” específico, basándonos en el uso efectivo y continuado que de este concepto de intención hace la crítica para hallar sentido a las obras, a la vez que mostramos cómo los límites de esa intención son ideológicamente determinados en el acto crítico. La interpretación aparece, pues, como práctica interactiva con frecuencia ciega a las convenciones discursivas que la hacen posible.

Authorial Intention in Literary Hermeneutics: On Two American Theories

Published in Miscelánea 12 (Zaragoza, 1991): 61-92.

En este artículo se examinan críticamente dos teorías antitéticas sobre el papel que ha de corresponder en crítica y hermenéutica a la intención del autor: son la “intentional fallacy” de los New Critics y el objetivismo historicista de E. D. Hirsch. Se propone una tercera vía: un objetivismo regulativo que es producto del debate ideológico.

Bibliografía de las obras de Samuel Beckett (1906-1989)

Originalmente publicada en la Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses 5 (1992): 213-39. Versión revisada.

Listado cronológico, por fecha de composición, de las obras literarias escritas por Samuel Beckett, en inglés y francés, y sus traducciones españolas.

Monsieur Verdoux: Notas sobre un caso ambiguo

Comentario de la película de Charles Chaplin MONSIEUR VERDOUX (1947), con atención a las dinámicas ambivalentes de identificación y de abyección propuestas por el film, y a la relación de éstas con el contexto cultural, ideológico y personal/psicológico de su creación.

Autor, Autor, Autor (Dencombe, James, Lodge y otros)

Este ensayo reflexiona sobre las angustias y satisfacciones de la interacción comunicativa del autor literario, ilustradas por un caso complejo de (autor)representación del autor—la novela de David Lodge sobre Henry James. Mientras que en relatos como "Los años medios" James representó parte de su propia inversión libidinal desplazada hacia la creación literaria, el retrato que Lodge nos da de James refleja en cierto modo las propias "ansiedades de autoría" de Lodge tal como se viven en una época en la que los autores son cada vez más visibles a través de los medios y del márketing editorial.

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This essay reflects on the anxieties and rewards attending authorship as a mode of communicative interaction, as illustrated by a complex case of authorial (self-)representation—David Lodge's writing a novel on Henry James. While James portrayed some of his own libidinal investment in authorship in such stories as "The Middle Years", Lodge's portrait of James reflects a measure of Lodge's own "anxiety of authorship" in an age of increased authorial visibility through the media and in publishers' marketing strategies.

Cómo mostrar cosas con palabras

Reseña del libro de Rui Linhares-Días "How to Show Things with Words: A Study on Logic, Language, and Literature" (Berlín y Nueva York: Mouton de Gruyter, 2006). Se trata de un estudio interdisciplinario ubicado entre la lógica formal, la lingüística cognitiva, la filosofía del lenguaje y la narratología, cuyo principal objeto de estudio es la relación entre el aspecto verbal y la representación narrativa de las acciones.

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This is a review of the book "How to Show Things with Words: A Study on Logic, Language, and Literature," by Rui Linhares-Días (Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 2006). The book is an interdisciplinary study at the intersection of formal logic, cognitive linguistics, language philosophy and narratology, with a main focus on the relationship between verbal aspect and the narrative representation of actions.

Hablarán de nuestra vida delante de nuestro cuerpo: La escritura como autoapropiación y trascendencia del sujeto en THE STONE DIARIES

This paper is an analysis and commentary of The Stone Diaries, a novel by Carol Shields, seen here as a reflexive exercise in the representation of life stories, eschewing the narrative fallacies attending totalization, the reification of character, and the hindsight bias inherent to retrospective accounts. The novel's ironic stance and metafictional narrative structures provide a way of simultaneously appropriating and transcending actual life experience and the identity associated to it, through an experiment in representing oneself as an-other.

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Este artículo analiza y comenta la novela de Carol Shields The Stone Diaries, vista aquí como un ejercicio reflexivo sobre la representación de historias vitales que consigue evitar las falacias narrativas asociadas a la totalización, a la reificación del carácter y a la distorsión retrospectiva inherente a las narraciones que rememoran el pasado. La perspectiva irónica de la novela y sus estructuras narrativas metaficcionales proporcionana una manera de a la vez apropiarse de la experiencia vital efectiva y de trascenderla, junto con la identidad asociada a ella, a través de una representación experimental del propio sujeto como (un) otro.

Potocki: Formalización del trayecto vital

En este artículo examino algunas especulaciones sobre la representación formal de biografías e historias vitales, tal como aparecen en el MANUSCRITO ENCONTRADO EN ZARAGOZA, novela-marco de Jan Potocki (1804, 1810). En la persona del geómetra Velázquez, Potocki a la vez satiriza las incipientes especulaciones de la Ilustración sobre una matematización de la psicología y comportamiento humanos, y participa sin embargo de ellas con contribuciones originales y sugerentes, que anticipan algunos elementos de narratologías formalistas posteriores.

Perspectiva narrativa sobre HISTORIA DEL TIEMPO, de Stephen Hawking

Versión preliminar (2007):
http://garciala.blogia.com/2007/101401-historia-del-tiempo.php

Reseña con resumen y comentario de HISTORIA DEL TIEMPO, de Stephen Hawking, sintetizando las tesis principales del libro y evaluándolas desde el punto de vista de una filosofía del tiempo (tanto cósmico como humano) informada por la teoría narrativa y la filosofía evolucionista. Cualquier historia o teoría del tiempo, por compleja que sea, ha de volverse más complicada una vez se tiene en cuenta el papel de las descripciones, modelos y teorías en tanto que instrumentos cognitivos históricamente situados. El lenguaje intencionalista de Hawking a la hora de describir el "diseño cósmico" también se somete a crítica.

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This is a review and commentary of Stephen Hawking's "A Brief History of Time", summarizing some of the book's main tenets and evaluating them from the standpoint of a philosophy of time (both cosmic and human) informed by narrative theory and by evolutionary philosophy. Any account of time, however complex, is futher complicated once the role of descriptions as historically situated cognitive instruments is taken into account. Hawking's intentionalist discourse as regards cosmic design is also criticized.

Internalized Interaction: The Specular Development of Language and the Symbolic Order

Social Science Research Network, 2007.

Este artículo expone una teoría simbólico-interaccionista de la consciencia como fenómeno emergente. Relaciona la teoría de Michael Arbib sobre el origen del lenguaje y el análisis de marcos de Erving Goffman, en especial su relevancia para una comprensión del sujeto y de la experiencia personal. El aspecto emergente de la consciencia también se trata desde la perspectiva de una teoría narrativa de la experiencia subjetiva y de la temporalidad humana que puede complementar útilmente las teorías de Arbib y Goffman y tender un puente entre ellas.

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This paper expounds a symbolic interactionist theory of consciousness as an emergent phenomenon. It relates Michael Arbib's theory of the origin of language and Erving Goffman's frame analysis, especially as it bears on our understanding of the subject and of personal experience. The emergent aspect of consciousness is also dealt with from the perspective of a narrative theory of subjective experience and of human temporality which can usefully complement and relate Arbib's and Goffman's views.

Atonement and Adaptation (on Ian McEwan's Novel and Joe Wright's Film)

This is a review of Ian McEwan's novel ATONEMENT (2001), with special attention to its narrative structure, and of the 2007 film ATONEMENT, directed by Joe Wright, discussing some issues specific to the filmic adaptation of this novel's metafictional structure.

"Pattern Recognition", de William Gibson: El presente presentido con jet-lag

William Gibson's "Pattern Recognition": Jet-Lagged Intimations of the Present
 
This paper is a commentary of William Gibson's novel "Pattern Recognition" (2003), with a special emphasis on the ideology of postmodernity and on networked globalization, on issues of symbolism and on the reflexive dimension of pattern recognition in the narrative semiotics of the novel itself, and in its aesthetic project.

Note: Downloadable document is in Spanish.

Keywords: Gibson; Postmodernity; Apophenia; Reflexivity; Globalization;

An Apocalypse of Total Communication

Published in Memory, Imagination and Desire in Contemporary Anglo-American Literature and Film. Ed. Constanza del Río-Álvaro and Luis Miguel García-Mainar. (Anglistische Forschungen, 337). Heidelberg: Winter, 2004. 253-68.

This paper deals with fantasies of universal connexion and total communication which culminate in a hellish or utopian apotheosis. These are exemplified with Olaf Stapledon's novel STAR MAKER (1937) and the film THE MATRIX (1999), written and directed by the Wachowski brothers. The paper focuses on some reflexive aspects of these fictions and on their relationship with their cultural background.

Review of Viviane Serfaty's "The Mirror and the Veil: An Overview of American Online Diaries and Blogs". (Amsterdam Monographs In American Studies, 11). …

(Shortened version of the review, published in ATLANTIS)

This is a review of Viviane Serfaty's landmark study of personal online diaries and personal blogs, with special attention to the micropolitics of self-representation in computer-mediated communication, the transformation of intimacy in the age of Internet, and the American tradition of individuality.

Harry Thompson, This Thing of Darkness: Narrative Anchoring

English version of "Harry Thompson: THIS THING OF DARKNESS: Anclaje narrativo".

This paper provides an "evolutionary" reading of Harry Thompson's novel THIS THING OF DARKNESS, a historical fiction on Darwin's Beagle voyage and the life of Captain FitzRoy. Special attention is paid to the novel's narrative anchoring of its events within the grand narratives of modernity and imperialism, of scientific and cultural development, and of human evolution at large.

Nuevas tendencias en traducción e identidad cultural

Review of NEW TRENDS IN TRANSLATION AND CULTURAL IDENTITY

El presente trabajo es una reseña y comentario por extenso del libro NEW TRENDS IN TRANSLATION AND CULTURAL IDENTITY, ed. Micaela Muñoz-Calvo, Carmen Buesa-Gómez, y M. Ángeles Ruiz-Moneva (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008). 459 p.

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This paper is a review and commentary, in Spanish, of the collective volume NEW TRENDS IN TRANSLATION AND CULTURAL IDENTITY, edited by Micaela Muñoz-Calvo, Carmen Buesa-Gómez and M. Ángeles Ruiz-Moneva (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008). The book's thirty chapters provide a panoramic introduction to many problems and issues in translation theory and practice, in a wide variety of cultural and communicative contexts. This volume will be of interest to students of translation as well as to those dealing with any of the many specific issues, both academic and professional, on which the individual papers focus. The book is divided in four thematic sections: I. Cultural identity, Ideology, and Translation; II. Popular culture, literature and translation; ; III. Translating the Media: Translating the Culture; IV. Scientific Discourse as Cultural Translation. Each of the thirty papers in the volume is summarized and commented in this review.

The Chains of Semiosis: Semiotics, Marxism, and the Female Stereotypes in THE MILL ON THE FLOSS

Published in Papers on Language and Literature 27.1 (Edwardsville, Illinois, 1991).

This paper puts forward a theory of literary writing as a practice of ideological transformation. The example analyzed is the representation of the sexes in George Eliot's novel THE MILL ON THE FLOSS, a representatoin which is intertextually mediated, metafictional, and transformatory, rather than merely "realistic" or spontaneous. This view of writing as a practice of material production in the intertextual field is theorized on the basis of V. N. Voloshinov's (or M. M. Bakhtin's) materialist linguistics, and of Peirce's semiotics. The methodological kinship between these researchers is asserted (as it was ignored in the 1980s, when this paper was written). The paper was partly reprinted in the Palgrave Macmillan Casebook on George Eliot's SILAS MARNER and THE MILL ON THE FLOSS, ed. Nahem Yousaf and Andrew Maunder (2002).

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Este artículo expone una teoría de la escritura artística como praxis de transformación ideológica. Como ejemplo se analiza la representación de los sexos en la novela de George Eliot, una representación que es intertextual, metaficcional y transformadora, más bien que meramente “realista” o espontánea. Esta concepción de la escritura como práctica de producción material sobre el campo de la intertextualidad se teoríza sobre la base de la lingüística materialista de Voloshinov (Bajtín) y la semiótica de Peirce; a la vez se señala el parentesco metodológico entre estos teorizadores, ignorado en los años 80 cuando se escribió este artículo. Este artículo ha sido recientemente reimpreso (sólo en su segunda mitad sobre George Eliot) en una selección de los mejores trabajos sobre dos novelas de George Eliot (THE MILL ON THE FLOSS and SILAS MARNER. Ed. Nahem Yousaf y Andrew Maunder. New Casebooks. Houndmills: Palgrave, 2002).

Narración, Identidad, Interacción: Relectura

Published in Paradojas de la interculturalidad: Filosofía, lenguaje y discurso. Ed. Mª Carmen López Sáenz and Beatriz Penas Ibáñez. (Razón y sociedad). Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 2008.

El título de este trabajo ha cambiado varias veces desde que empecé a redactarlo. A veces descubrimos lo que queríamos decir únicamente cuando lo hemos dicho, o descubrimos quiénes somos sólo al ver lo que hemos hecho. También sobre eso versa este trabajo. Examina la naturaleza configurativa del discurso, haciendo converger varios temas diferenciados: 1) la relectura, 2) la narración, 3) la identidad, 4) la interacción. A ellos se refiere el título, que también intenta efectuar una configuración preliminar de estos términos uniéndolos parcialmente en una frase un tanto problemática, algo así como "relectura de las relaciones entre narración, identidad, e interacción (y relectura)". Comenzamos a realizar una integración parcial de estos términos dispares mediante comparaciones tentativas o síntesis parciales, viendo primero por pares los conceptos a los que se refiere el título, unos en términos de otros. Por ejemplo, empezando por "identidad" y "narración", examinando las condicionantes narrativas de la identidad, y seguidamente "relectura" y "narración", examinando la narración como una forma de relectura.

The Poetics of Subliminal Awareness: Re-reading Intention and Narrative Structure in Nabokov's "Christmas Story"

Published in European Journal of English Studies 8.1 (2004).

This paper puts forward a theory of the integration of the various levels of communicative interaction in literary texts, ranging from the activation of proxemic elements at the action level, to the interaction between author and reader, as well as their textualized images. The paper shows how a given stylistic practice, Nabokov's in "The Christmas Story", is able to exploit, for highly elaborate communicative purposes, the complex integration into a semiotic continuum of these multiple levels of representation. This thesis is sustained with a detailed argumentation which takes into account the actual reception of the work, and the way in which this reception evidences the author's stylistic technique, consisting in the calculated subliminal activation of specific reading paths (intertextual associations, creation of local memories, etc.). The paper also suggests a possible relationship between the reflexive structures of narrative and some specific modes of neurological processing associated to the generation of conscious phenomena.

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Este artículo desarrolla una teoría de la integración de los diversos niveles de interacción comunicativa en el texto literario, que va desde la activación de elementos proxémicos al nivel de la acción hasta la interacción entre autor y lector, así como entre sus imágenes textualizadas. Mostramos cómo una determinada práctica estilística, la de Nabokov, es capaz de explotar con fines comunicativos altamente elaborados la complejidad de esta integración de múltiples niveles de representación en un continuo semiótico. Desarrollamos esta tesis con una argumentación detallada que tiene en cuenta la recepción efectiva de la obra, y la manera en que esta recepción evidencia la técnica estilística de Nabokov consistente en la activación subliminal calculada de tramas de lectura determinadas (intertextualidad, creación de memoria local, etc.). También apuntamos la posible relación entre las estructuras reflexivas de la narración y modalidades específicas de procesamiento neurológico asociadas a la generación de los fenómenos conscientes.

Rereading(,) Narrative(,) Identity(,) and Interaction

Published in INTERCULTURALISM: BETWEEN IDENTITY AND DIVERSITY, ed. Beatriz Penas Ibáñez and Mª Carmen López Sáenz. Bern: Peter Lang, 2006.

There has been a change in my title since I first began to work on this paper: often enough we only discover what we wanted to say once we have said it—and who we are once we see what we have done. The paper is also about that. I will address the configurational nature of discourse, bringing together a number of distinct topics: (1) rereading, (2) narrative, (3) identity, and (4) interaction. The title should point that way: it also attempts an initial configuration of these terms by partially joining them in a (problematized) sentence: "rereading narrative identity and interaction".
    We might attempt an initial integration of these disparate terms through tentative comparisons or partial syntheses, by seeing first the elements of our title in terms of one another. For instance, "identity" and "narrative", to begin with, and then "rereading" and "narrative", by examining narrative as a form of rereading.

Hindsight, Intertextuality, and Interpretation: A Symbol in Nabokov's "Christmas"

Published in Symbolism: An International Annual of Critical Aesthetics (New York: AMS Press), 5 (2005): 267-94.

This essay examines the significance of the butterfly symbolism in Vladimir Nabokov's story 'Christmas' in the light of an interactional theory of interpretation. Intertextual elements ar shown to emerge through a process of critical debate, rereading and discursive interaction, as the cultural significance of a text is gradually established. The critical approach in this paper tries to combine the insights of discourse analysis, narrative hermeneutics, and literary pragmatics.

Review of CHILDREN'S LITERATURE AS COMMUNICATION, ed. Roger Sell

Review of Children's Literature as Communication: The ChiLPA Project. Ed. Roger Sell. Language and Literature 14.2 (2005):  205-8.

"Children's Literature as Communication: The ChiLPA Project" is a volume of essays edited by Roger Sell (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2002). The acronym ChiLPA stands for ‘Children’s Literature, Pure and Applied’, a research and doctoral training programme at Åbo Akademi. The high points in the book are Roger Sell’s introduction and his chapter ‘Reader-learners: Children’s Novels and Participatory Pedagogy’, together with Maria Nikolajeva’s ch. 6. There are other notable contributions by Niklas Bengtsson and Rosemary Ross Johnston. The volume is divided into three parts: ‘Initiating’ and ‘Negotiating’ are more theoretical/critical, while ‘Responding: Pragmatic variables’ is more directly concerned with pedagogical research projects and curricular design.

Narrating Narrating

Paper presented at the 7th Conference of the European Society for the Study of English (ESSE/7, Zaragoza, 8-12 September 2004).

An early version of the paper published in THEORIZING NARRATIVITY, ed. John Pier and José Angel García Landa (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2008).

There is a structural/genetic continuity between everyday oral narrative and elaborate literary narratives, with listeners gradually becoming an audience. Literary stories which narrate narratings keep us aware of this continuity, and build bridges between advanced literate and oral forms, reappropriating orality for literature, and constructing advanced interactional forms precisely through a return, with a difference, to the origins of narrative interaction. The paper examines some aspects of oral narration in written fiction, and suggests the general proposition that retelling is a crucial concept in narrative analysis, as narratives always retell earlier narratives.

Deconstructive Intentions: On the Critique of the Hermeneutics of Understanding

Published in  BELLS 5 (1994): 19-38.

This paper examines the use which is made of the concept of intention in the deconstructivist theories of Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man and Stanley Fish. The radicality of the deconstructive approach is put into question due to some discrepancies between its theory and its practical implementation. As in other related papers, I try articulate a concept of intention which accounts for the actual critical use which is made of it, and which at the same time takes into account the role of interpretive interaction in the construction of intentional coherence, in particular as regards the performative dimension of critical discourse.

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Examinamos en este artículo el uso que se hace del concepto de intención en las teorías desconstructivistas (Derrida, de Man, Fish...) señalando algunas incoherencias entre teoría y práctica que ponen en cuestión la radicalidad de los planteamientos desconstructivistas. Como en otros trabajos, intentamos formular un concepto de intención que explique la práctica crítica que de él se hace y que a la vez tenga en cuenta el papel de la interacción interpretativa en la construcción de la coherencia intencional, en especial el valor realizativo del discurso crítico.

Review of Roger Sell's MEDIATING CRITICISM: LITERARY EDUCATION HUMANIZED

Published in Language and Literature 12.3 (2003): 283-85.

In LITERATURE AS COMMUNICATION Roger Sell expounded an extended theory of linguistic politeness and a theory of literature as communicative interaction. Here we find the application to the criticism of poetry and fiction. This companion volume, MEDIATING CRITICISM: LITERARY EDUCATION HUMANIZED is more ‘literary’ than linguistic or theoretical. Sell’s mediating criticism provides a critique and an appropriation of the insights of twentieth-century literature and theory (e.g. the ‘resisting reading’ of political criticism, feminism, or cross-cultural criticism) within an ongoing humanist project, as seen in his vindication of authors’ individualities as relevant elements in criticism. The three sections of the book deal with the three hallmarks of mediating criticism: empathy, recognition of past achievement in its own context, and “a responsiveness to literature’s underlying hopefulness.”

Arresting Deconstruction: On Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's Cultural Criticism

Published in REDEN (Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos) vol. 7 no. 14 (1997).

A leading figure of the second wave of deconstructive criticism in America, Gayatri Spivak has developed a critical approach in which post-structuralist hermeneutics is oriented towards a political criticism engaged with the problems of post-colonialism and materialist feminism. This paper examines the methodologically progressive aspects of Spivak's critique in her book IN OTHER WORLDS, and also the unsatisfactory solution given to some of the main problems she deals with. In spite of its undeniable interest, Spivak's theory is often inconsistent in its attempts to conciliate the interests and methods of rhetorical criticism and political/cultural criticism.

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Como figura destacada de la segunda ola de la crítica desconstructivista en Norteamérica, Gayatri Spivak ha desarrollado un enfoque crítico en el que la hermenéutica post-estructuralista se dirige hacia la crítica política comprometida con la problemática del post-colonialismo y el feminismo de base marxista. En este artículo se señalan las características metodológicamente progresivas de la crítica de Spivak en su libro IN OTHER WORLDS, y también la resolución insatisfactoria de algunos de los principales problemas allí tratados. A pesar de su interés innegable, la teoría de Spivak es a menudo inconsistente en sus intentos de conciliar los intereses y metodologías de la crítica retórica y la crítica político cultural.

Speech Act Theory and the Concept of Intention in Literary Criticism

Published in Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses 24 (1992): 89-104.

The aim of this paper is to trace the outline of a speech act theory of literature, taking into account the work of critics who react against the prevailing anti-intentionalist schools of criticism, such as the New Criticism, some versions of structuralism, and deconstruction. The intentionalist critics prepare the ground for a theory of literary discourse considered as a speech act, since it is known that the concept of intention is central to the analysis of speech acts. Such a theory of literary discourse should not overlook the role played by criticism in expanding the meaning of a text, and should go beyond a narrow definition of interpretation as the identification of the author's intention.

'Personne': Aventuras de 'yo' en la trilogía de Beckett

Published in STVDIA PATRICIAE SHAW OBLATA. Ed. Santiago González y Fernández-Corugedo et al. Oviedo: Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Oviedo, 1991. 1.230-42.

Analizamos en este artículo las maneras en que la escritura experimental de Beckett subvierte el uso estándar de la persona pronominal, transformando al pronombre de primera persona y sus avatares en el protagonista de una línea argumental. Se expone así de modo gráfico cómo el valor estándar de un elemento lingüístico a nivel de sistema gramatical es infinitamente manipulable y “reprogramable” en un contexto discursivo adecuado, de tal modo que (contra Benveniste) sólo el análisis textual del uso efectivo y contextualizado permite determinar el sentido en que un elemento es “persona” o “no persona” y la manera en que constituye la subjetividad del hablante, en el caso concreto de los pronombres.

'Abstracted to Death': Estética del bilingüismo y la traducción en la prosa de Beckett

Published in "Actas del XI Congreso de A.E.D.E.A.N. (Translation Across Cultures)." Ed. Julio César Santoyo. León: Secretariado de Publicaciones de la Universidad de León, 1989.

Revisamos someramente la poética del bilingüismo en Samuel Beckett y su actividad como auto-traductor del inglés al francés, y del francés al inglés, en su relación con el desarrollo de su estilo narrativo minimalista.
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This is an overview of Samuel Beckett's bilingual poetics and his activity as a self-translator from English to French and from French to English, as it relates to the evolution of his minimalist narrative style.

Intertextuality and Exoticism in Salman Rushdie's THE MOOR'S LAST SIGH

Co-authored with Beatriz Penas Ibáñez. Published in ." In "NEW" EXOTICISMS: CHANGING PATTERNS IN THE CONSTRUCTION OF OTHERNESS. Ed. Isabel Santaolalla. (Postmodern Studies, 29). Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 2000.

This paper analyses Salman Rushdie's novel THE MOOR'S LAST SIGH (1995) as a postmodernist text emphasising the role of narrative voice and of intertextuality within the intepretive act, and their implications for the study of intercultural understanding, the postmodern treatment of the exotic, of truth, and of the constructedness of the subject. Intertextuality becomes a central literary strategy whose function is to accomodate a multiplicity of cultural discourses and to articulate a postcolonial perspective on exoticism. In THE MOOR'S LAST SIGH, Rushdie acknowledges the cultural and historical positioning of the reading and writing of narrative fiction, and reflects on the nature of the limits between the visual and verbal text as well as the more general one between fiction and history, and uses his individual historical locus (the aftermath of the Rushdie affair) in order to play with the generic frames activated in reading different kinds of texts.

El formalismo crítico académico durante las vanguardias

Published in HISTORIA DE LA CRITICA Y LA TEORIA LITERARIAS EN ESTADOS UNIDOS. Ed. Ricardo Miguel Alfonso. Madrid: Verbum, 2001.

Este capítulo del libro HISTORIA DE LA CRITICA Y LA TEORÍA LITERARIAS EN ESTADOS UNIDOS versa sobre dos escuelas críticas enormemente influyentes en el mundo anglosajón, especialmente a mediados y finales del siglo XX. Se trata de la Nueva Crítica (New Criticism) y de la Escuela de Chicago. Ambas corrientes son formalistas y están interesadas en el estudio de los textos literarios en tanto que objetos estéticos; ven en la obra literaria no tanto un documento histórico o sociológico cuanto una obra de arte. Algunos de los principales nombres asociados a estos movimientos son los nuevos críticos John Crowe Ransom, Cleanth Brooks, W. K. Wimsatt, Monroe Beardsley, R. P. Blackmur, Yvor Winters; de la Escuela de Chicago son especialmente conocidos R. S. Crane, Elder Olson, y Wayne Booth. La influencia de estas escuelas no se agota en ellas mismas, sino que sus prácticas críticas y sus análisis han sido absorbidos y difundidos por todas las escuelas de décadas posteriores interesadas en la forma y el lenguaje de las obras literarias.

'Unnullable Least': Vacío y metaficción en el Beckett de los ochenta

Paper presented at the 10th AEDEAN Conference (Zaragoza, 1986). Published in "Actas del X Congreso Nacional A.E.D.E.A.N.: Zaragoza, 16-19 de diciembre de 1986: Conmemorativo de su fundación". Zaragoza: A.E.D.E.A.N. (Asociación Española de Estudios Anglo-Norteamericanos), 1988: 321-330.

Este artículo examina dos obras narrativas tardías de Samuel Beckett, "Mal Vu Mal Dit" y "Worstward Ho", situándolas en el desarrollo de la estética metaficcional y autorreflexiva del autor. Los rasgos minimalistas de estas obras se ven como una modalidad de autorreferencialidad narrativa y estética.

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This paper examines two of Samuel Beckett's late narrative works, "Ill Seen Ill Said" and "Worstward Ho", setting them in the context of the author's developing metafictional and self-reflexive aesthetics. The minimalist features of the works are analyzed as a mode of narrative and aesthetic self-referentiality.

'Another Game in Vew': The representation of the Poet in THE FAERIE QUEENE

Published in REVISTA ALICANTINA DE ESTUDIOS INGLESES 2 (Alicante, 1989): 65-81.

Many 20th-century critics of THE FAERIE QUEENE have established an artificial distinction between the narrator of THE FAERIE QUEENE and Spenser, one which posits an Olympian detachment of the author from the work, and of both from the historical circumstances in which the work was written. An analysis of the poem reveals the limited sense in which a distinction between the narrator and the implied author may be drawn, and shows how the incompleteness of the work and some of its structural and thematic tensions are due to its changing significance as a political project undertaken by Spenser.

Samuel Johnson's RASSELAS: The Duplicity of Choice and the Sense of an Ending

Published in REVISTA CANARIA DE ESTUDIOS INGLESES 19/20 (1989-1990).

Samuel Johnson's philosophical novel THE HISTORY OF RASSELAS, PRINCE OF ABISSINIA, deals with "The Choice of Life."    This phrase, which is emphasized several times throughout the novel,  is also its shortest conceivable summary.  The issue of that choice, however, is not clear.  In spite of Johnson's well-turned aphorisms, Rasselas' choice of life remains inconclusive.  Worse still, a study of the response to the work throughout its life reveals that the readers of the book have interpreted this inconclusiveness, and the doctrine of the book as a whole, in widely different ways—the implied authorial attitude of the work has proved difficult to discern. These disagreements reveal some tensions in the thematic structure of the novel and in Johnson's system of morals.  The status of Johnson's novel as a literary artifact seems to work against its purported moral content.  A comprehensive interpretation of RASSELAS cannot see it as the seamless product of its author's intention. 

'The Enthusiastick Fit': The Function and Fate of the Poet in Samuel Johnson's RASSELAS

Published in Cuadernos de Investigación Filológica 17.1 (1991): 103-26.

This is an essay on eighteenth-century literary theory and on Samuel Johnson's novel THE HISTORY OF RASSELAS, PRINCE OF ABYSSINIA (1759). Johnson's literary theory as reflected in RASSELAS is examined in the light of other pronouncements on poetics by this author, and of aesthetic reflection in this period. Johnson's relationships both with classicism and with pre-Romanticism resist interpretations which disregard the tension between the author's lucidity and his dogmatism. The paper addresses the issue of the interpretation of authorial levels of intentionality, and of the traces they leave on the textual structure. In the last analysis, two different modes of textual coherence are found in Johnson's work, which result from the author's ideological and emotional conflicts.

'It's Stories Still': La reflexividad en las narraciones de Samuel Beckett

Published in "Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses" 5 (1992): 57-82

This paper explores the use of reflexive and metafictional narrative structures in THE UNNAMABLE and other texts by Samuel Beckett. Reflexivity is shown to be the structural basis of Beckett's fiction at all textual levels, from the articulation of character and plot development, through the use of narrative voice and modality, to the implied authorial level and the aesthetic stance of the text. Narratology and deconstruction are used as analytical tools to explore the peculiar semiotic productivity of the Beckettian text and draw the aesthetic and philosophical implications of Beckett's use of narrative form.

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Este artículo examina el uso de estructuras narrativas reflexivas y metaficcionales en EL INNOMBRABLE y en otros textos de Samuel Beckett. Se muestra cómo la reflexividad es la base estructural de la narrativa de Beckett en todos los niveles textuales, desde la articulación de los personajes y del desarrollo argumental, pasando por el uso de la voz narrativa y modalidades de la narración, hasta el nivel autorial implícito y la actitud estética del texto. La narratología y la desconstrucción se utilizan como herramientas analíticas para explorar la particular productividad semiótica del texto beckettiano, y para extraer las implicaciones estéticas y filosóficas del uso que hace Beckett de las formas narrativas.

Reseña de HYPER/TEXT/THEORY, ed. George P. Landow

Published in MISCELÁNEA 18 (1997): 372-76.

Reseña del libro editado por George P. Landow HYPER/TEXT/THEORY (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1994), volumen sobre el impacto del hipertexto en teoría literaria, narratología y escritura experimental. La reseña atiende sobre todo a los desarrollos complementarios a la teoría de Landow que podían vislumbrarse en los primeros años del hipertexto global, la World Wide Web.

Catastrofismo y retrospección: Hermenéutica narrativa en la biología y en la historia

Paper read at the conference "Beyond Borders." Universidad de Zaragoza, 2000. There is an English version at Academia: "Catastrophism and Hindsight".

Se trata de un artículo sobre la distorsión retrospectiva o "hindsight bias". Comento un paralelismo observable entre algunas teorías de la evolución biológica por una parte y de la hermenéutica textual por otra. El análisis se centra sobre dos obras: "Wonderful Life", de Stephen Jay Gould, y "Foregone Conclusions: Against Apocalyptic History", de Michael André Bernstein. En ambas se observa una alta consciencia de la naturaleza inevitablemente narrativa de la historia, así como una llamada de aviso ante la interpretación direccional de la historia, en la que ven una ilusión perspectivística que resulta de esta narratividad.

Catastrophism and Hindsight: Narrative Hermeneutics in Biology and in Historiography

Published in "Beyond Borders: Redefining Generic and Ontological Boundaries." Ed. Ramón Plo-Alastrue and María Jesús Martínez-Alfaro. (Anglistische Forschungen, 303). Heidelberg: Winter, 2002. 105-119.

The paper deals with some cognitive implications of hindsight bias. It examines some analogies between contemporary views on the evolution of life on one hand and present-day textual hermeneutics on the other. For the purpose of my analysis, these disciplines will be represented by two works: "Wonderful Life", by Stephen Jay Gould, and "Foregone Conclusions", by Michael André Bernstein. Both evince an intense awareness of the inescapably narrative nature of historical studies, and both warn against teleological interpretations of history. Such directionality is denounced as the product of hindsight, a perspectival illusion resulting from the narrative nature of history.

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Se trata de una reflexión sobre el fenómeno cognitivo de la distorsión retrospectiva o "hindsight bias". Comento en este artículo un paralelismo observable entre algunas teorías recientes de la evolución biológica por una parte y de la hermenéutica textual por otra. El análisis se centra sobre dos obras: "Wonderful Life", de Stephen Jay Gould, y "Foregone Conclusions", de Michael André Bernstein. En ambas se observa una alta consciencia de la naturaleza inevitablemente narrativa de la historia, así como una llamada de aviso ante la interpretación direccional de la historia, en la que ven una ilusión perspectivística que resulta de esta narratividad.

Reflexivity in the Narrative Technique of AS I LAY DYING

Published in 'English Language Notes' 27.4 (1990): 63-72.

This paper offers a metafictional reading of William Faulkner's novel AS I LAY DYING (1930), a reading which goes beyond the usual mimetic interpretation of this novel as an exploration of the characters' psychology. Faulkner's writing also explores and allegorizes itself, through the creation of paradoxical narrative forms which carry out an implicit meditation on the modernist problematics of narrative representation.

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Consiste el artículo en una lectura metaficcional de la novela de William Faulkner AS I LAY DYING (1930), lectura que va más allá de la clásica interpretación mimética que se solía ofrecer de esta novela como una exploración de la psicología de los personajes. La escritura de Faulkner también se explora y alegoriza a sí misma, creando formas narrativas paradójicas que suponen una meditación implícita sobre la problemática de la representación narrativa modernista.

Understanding Misreading: A Hermeneutic-Deconstructive Approach

Published in 'The Pragmatics of Understanding and Misunderstanding'. Ed. Beatriz Penas. Zaragoza: Universidad de Zaragoza, 1998. 57-72.

This paper puts forward a conception of specialised literary criticism, more specifically deconstructive readings, as a mode of communicative interaction which can be described through a pragmalinguistic account. Schleiermacher's conception of the hermeneutic circle provides an adequate bridge between literary criticism and speech production, once we attend to the possible developments of the theory of the hermeneutic circle understanding it as both a temporal process, and an interactional one. This paper, therefore, presents for the purpose of comparison several critical conceptions originating in different schools and dealing with a range of objects of study in criticism. The comparison yields a common element whose outline becomes gradually visible as we proceed, as each of these conceptions (hermeneutics, deconstruction, modernist aesthetics, pragmalinguistics...) brings out aspects which are implicit in the others. This exercise might be compared to the drawing of lines between stars to form a constellation, allowing us to see a previously invisible figure. The lines in constellations may seem too insubstantial as a term of comparison, but the paper will go some length towards the deconstruction of the clear-cut opposition between what is substantial and what is constructed by the imagination, at least as far as the field of interpretive theory is concerned. The thread connecting the critical approaches examined here is the retrsopective rereading of a narrative and its hermeneutic consequences. These consequences might be summarized by saying that the passing of time alters everything, even the past itself, once so safely stored.

'Silence Once Broken': Metalenguaje y clausura narrativa en Beckett

Published in In "Miscel.lània homenatge Enrique García Díez". Ed. Angel López García and Evangelina Rodríguez Cuadros. Universitat de Valencia / Consellería de Cultura, Educació i Ciència de la Generalitat Valenciana, 1991. 117-28.

Se trata de un estudio de la novela "El Innombrable" de Samuel Beckett, en particular de sus aspectos reflexivos y metaficcionales, y de la especialidad modalidad de estructuración narrativa y de clausura articulada en esta novela. Es una aproximación situada entre la estética, la semiótica y la fenomenología. Estudiamos aquí el sentido en que puede decirse que el silencio es un elemento constituyente de la escritura de Beckett. Este fenómeno se presenta evidentemente como una paradoja, y se articula a través del uso artístico del metalenguaje.

'Till Nohow On': The Later Metafiction of Samuel Beckett

Paper presented at the inaugural conference of the European Society for the Study of English (ESSE), University of East Anglia, Norwich, 4-8 Sept. 1991. Published in British Postmodern Fiction. Ed. Theo D'haen and Hans Bertens. (Postmodern Studies, 7). Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1993. 63-76.

This paper examines some of Samuel Beckett's late narratives ("Company", "Ill Seen Ill Said", "Worstward Ho" and "Stirrings Still"), with a focus on the evolution of his metafictional techniques, and more specifically the growing importance acquired by the thematization of the compositional process itself, as well as the attention paid to closure. These texts are interpreted here as explorations of the element of reading inherent to writing (implied reception). The paper also analyzes the stylistics of Beckett's prose and discusses its significance.

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Este artículo analiza la narrativa tardía de Samuel Beckett ("Company", "Ill Seen Ill Said", "Worstward Ho"  y "Stirrings Still") considerando la evolución de sus técnicas metaficcionales, en concreto la importancia creciente que adquiere la tematización del propio proceso compositivo, y la atención prestada a la clausura de la obra. Se interpretan estos textos como una exploración del elemento de lectura inherente a la escritura (recepción implícita). También procedemos al análisis estilístico de la prosa de Beckett y su significación.

Reseña de ADAM'S TONGUE, de Derek Bickerton

This is an extensive review and commentary, in Spanish, of Derek Bickerton's book ADAM'S TONGUE: HOW HUMANS MADE LANGUAGE, HOW LANGUAGE MADE HUMANS (2009). The book puts forward an evolutionary theory of the origin of language (and mankind) which is attentive to the ecological functions of animal communication systems, and builds a bridge between linguistic emergentism and the theory of ecological niche-building (Lewontin, Odling-Smee et al.). Bickerton is particularly critical of Chomskian approaches to the issue of the origin of language, and of the current genetic bias in biology, which underestimates the behavioral adaptiveness and flexibility that allowed the emergence of language in a very specific ecological niche: collaborative scavenging.

Keywords: Language, Evolution, Ecology, Origin of language, Homo, Scavengers, Ecological niche, Emergence, Communication, Animal communication, Speech, Behavior

Speech Acts, Literary Tradition, and Intertextual Pragmatics

Published in THE INTERTEXTUAL DIMENSION OF DISCOURSE, ed. Beatriz Penas. Zaragoza (Spain): University of Zaragoza, Servicio de Publicaciones, 1996.

There is a potential kinship between some central concepts of classical literary criticism (such as tradition, genre, originality, allusion) and some more recent ones developed by formalist/structuralist criticism (intertextuality, defamiliarization) and by linguistic pragmatics (illocution, indirect speech acts, pragmatic principles and communicative maxims). Reflecting on the common ground shared by these notions may shed some light on the relationship between linguistics and literary theory. This paper discusses, as one among a wide range of pragmatic constraints on literature, the intertextual relationship between a work and the tradition it belongs to and which helps define it. It is argued that intertextual signals do not have to be overt even when deliberate, and that deliberate signals do not exhaust a work’s intertextuality (since, for one thing, it will itself give rise to new links).

Emergent Narrativity

Published in the book "Linguistic Interaction in/and Specific Discourses". Ed. Marta Conejero López, Micaela Muñoz Calvo and Beatriz Penas Ibáñez. Valencia: Editorial Universitat Politècnica de València, 2010. 109-17.

Emergent Narrativity

This paper deals with those dimensions of narrative which define it as such (i.e. narrativity). It examines some current conceptions of narrativity, and puts forward an emergentist theory of narrativity, one which takes into account the narrative structuring effected by narratological analysis itself as a distinct cognitive activity.

Keywords: Literary theory, Narrative, Narratology, Narrativity, Emergence, Consciousness, Cognition,

Linkterature: From Word to Web: Or, Literature in the Internet - Internet as Literature - Literature as Internet - Internet in Literature

Abridged version published in "The Texture of Internet: Netlinguistics in Progress". Ed. Santiago Posteguillo, María José Esteve and M. Lluïsa Gea-Valor. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007.

This paper offers a perspective on the Internet and literature interface, with a special focus on the issue of intertextuality, in an attempt to delimit those issues specific to networked literature, as against digital or hypertextual literature. I will focus on literature as a family of medium-conditioned discursive practices, and examine the consequences of digital networks for a redefinition of these practices. These consequences will be approached from four viewpoints: a perspective on the Internet as literature, and of literature as an Internet: together with an examination of literature in the Internet, and of the Internet in literature. Among the topics addressed will be issues of interactivity, the blogosphere, postmodernist fiction, and the cyborganization of social communication.

Keywords: Internet, Literature, Publishing, Media, Intertextuality, Links, Hypertext, Blogs

Los blogs y la narratividad de la experiencia

Blogs and the Narrativity of Experience
   
This paper undertakes an analysis of the narrativity of a form of discourse which has appeared recently (blogs) within the framework of an emergentist theory of narrativity and its discursive modes. The narrative/discursive characteristics of blogs emerge from a preexistent ground of more basic or less specific communicative practices; and narrative discursivity itself is an emergent phenomenon with respect to other cognitive and experiential phenomena. A number of formal and communicative characteristics of blog writing and of the blogosphere are discussed as emergent modes of experience within the pragmatic context of computer-mediated communication.

Keywords: Blogs, Narrative, Narrativity, Narratology, Experience, Time, Processes, Communication, Discourse, Emergence, Interaction, World Wide Web, Internet,

Expiación y adaptación (Sobre "Atonement", de Ian McEwan y Joe Wright)

Atonement and Adaptation (on Ian McEwan's Novel and Joe Wright's Film)
   
This is a review of Ian McEwan's novel Atonement (2001), with special attention to its narrative structure, and of the 2007 film Atonement directed by Joe Wright, discussing some issues specific to the filmic adaptation of this novel's metafictional structure.

Keywords: Literature, English novel, McEwan, Atonement, Adaptation, Reflexivity, Metafiction,

Actos de habla en la literatura: Reseña de la obra de J. Hillis Miller

Speech Acts in Literature: A Review of J. Hillis Miller's Work (Actos de Habla en la Literatura: Reseña de J. Hillis Miller)
 
This is an extensive review and commentary of J. Hillis Miller's book "Speech Acts in Literature", a major theoretical and critical work which discusses the speech act theory and practice of J. L. Austin, Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, and Marcel Proust. Hillis Miller's insights are discussed in the light of the pragmaticist theory of communicative interaction and of critical interpretation expounded elsewhere by J. A. García Landa. The discussion is relevant to students of linguistics and to those interested in hermeneutics, reader-response criticism and the ethics of literature and criticism.

Note: PDF is in Spanish

Keywords: Speech_acts, Pragmatics, Hillis_Miller, Austin, Derrida, de_Man, Interaction, Hermeneutics, Criticism, Interpretation

Hemingway Meets Beckett: "The Road", de Cormac McCarthy

Hemingway Meets Beckett: Cormac McCarthy's 'The Road'
   
A review of Cormac McCarthy's novel "The Road" (Pulitzer Prize 2007), with a special focus on its Modernist rewriting of apocalyptic science fiction, its connections to Hemingway and Beckett's style and themes, and its autobiographical investment.

Keywords: Cormac McCarthy, The Road, Hemingway, Beckett, Science fiction, Nuclear war, Apocalypse

Netiqueta, Cortesía, Estrategia y Sabiduría

Netiquette, Politeness, Strategy and Wisdom
   
This paper provides a pragmatic framework for the analysis of argumentation and written interaction in computer-mediated communication (e.g. in forums or blogs). Grice's maxims are supplemented with a theory of linguistic politeness derived from Leech, which is in turn subordinated to a strategic theory of interaction and finally to a theory of aims and action, as defined in ideology and philosophy. Netiquette, politeness, strategy and wisdom are therefore structurally subordinated to each other in the overall theory of human action which includes computer-mediated communication.

Keywords: Netiquette, Politeness, Strategy, Wisdom, Action, Communication, Interaction, Pragmatics, CMC, Grice, Leech, Goffman, Forums, Blogs, Conversation, Rationality, Aims

A Blogal Conversation (Reseña de J. Torio, "A Global Conversation")

A Blogal Conversation
   
A review of James Torio's thesis "Blogs: A Global Conversation", on the communications revolution of blogs, social networking and the Web 2.0, and its implications for marketing strategies, most notably the availability of new marketing niches in the long tail economy and the transformation of public relations.

Note: Downloadable document is in Spanish.

Keywords: Blogs, Marketing, Economy, Internet, Long tail, Public Relations

Wilde y el enigma de la Esfinge

Wilde and the Riddle of the Sphinx
   
Oscar Wilde's essay "The Critic as Artist" is shown to foreshadow some key concepts of poststructuralist interpretive theory - such as the necessary interplay of blindness and insight in criticism (Lacan, Paul de Man), or the retroactive effect of interpretation in the construction of the work. More specifically, Wilde's reading of the riddle of the Sphinx in a passage of this work both theorizes and dramatizes the paradoxical relationship between blindness and insight, in the shape of an ironic prophecy which can be read as Wilde's announcement of his own tragic downfall - in which there is an element of compulsive acting out that has been noted by a number of previous critics. That is, Wilde's Sphinx is used as the vehicle of a riddle about Wilde himself, and is an emblem of his own ambivalent attitude toward the public revelation of his homosexuality.

Note: Downloadable document is in Spanish.

Keywords: Wilde, Sphinx, Hermeneutics, Interpretation, Lacan, Criticism

Goffman: La realidad como expectativa autocumplida y el teatro de la interioridad

Goffman: Reality as Self-Fulfilling Expectation and the Theatre of Interiority

A critical exposition, in Spanish, of Erving Goffman's theories on the semiotic organization of social reality and on the structure of subjectivity and subjective experience (two sides of the same coin) through a detailed analysis of the conclusion to Goffman's "Frame Analysis" (1974). Goffman's insights into the interactional nature of subjectivity are related to other theorists' conceptions of the role of reflexivity in perception, consciousness and the structuring of semiotic artifacts (language, narrative, art).

Note: Downloadable document is in Spanish.

Keywords: Goffman, Reality, Frames, Expectations, Subject, Subjectivity, Interaction, Communication, Cognition, Reflexivity

Ficción narrativa y Evolución

Narrative Fiction and Evolution
   
This is a review, in Spanish, of Steven Pinker's essay "Toward a Consilient Study of Literature", which is itself a review of and a response to the theories expounded in the collection on literary sociobiology "The Literary Animal", edited by Jonathan Gottschall and David Sloan Wilson. Some insights and limitations of cultural darwinism are here examined from the point of view of emergentist philosophy, anthropology and philology, complementing Pinker's psychological critique.

Keywords: Evolution, Pinker, Consilience, Fiction, Narrative, Sociobiology

Crítica acrítica, crítica crítica

Acritical Criticism, Critical Criticism
   
This paper theorizes critical readings from an interactional / argumentative point of view, situating them on a scale going from consonant, "friendly" criticism, to dissonant, confrontational or "unfriendly" criticism. Some key critical notions (by Oscar Wilde, Stanley Fish, Paul Ricoeur, Judith Fetterley and H. Porter Abbott) are examined in the light of this conception of criticism, and situated within the framework of interactional pragmatics.

Keywords: Criticism, Pragmatics, Dialogism, Wilde, Fish, Ricoeur, Interaction, Emergence, Ideology

The paper is in Spanish.

La identidad intertextual: La misteriosa llamada de la reina Loana

This is a review, in Spanish, of Umberto Eco's novel "La misteriosa fiamma della regina Loana" (2004) with a special focus on its portrayal of the self and memory, and reflections on the way the novel's treatment reveals the intertextual makeup of personal identity and of ideology, and their grounding in a specific cultural and discursive environment.

13 lunas, 12 noches: Calendarios, ciclos, tiempos muertos y diferencia de género (a propósito de Twelfth Night).

13 Moons, Twelve Nights: Calendars, Cycles, Time Out of Time and Gender Difference (A Note on 'Twelfth Night')

This paper focuses on the notion of the time between the winter solstice and the beginning of the new year as a time with a special status, a time out of time as it were, rooted in a tradition of folklore and popular calendrics. The notion of a time that stops, associated in Twelfth Night to a lull, a time of waiting, and of mourning, is combined in Shakespeare's play with the interruption of practical time during a theatrical performance or a festival. This no man's time is shown to have gender-specific connotations rooted in the mismatch of the lunar and solar calendars. Shakespeare's play with generic confusion in the play is characteristic of the suspension of the normal order of time, before the reassertion of renewed time and accepted gender roles when the new cycle of time begins for good.

Note: Downloadable document is in Spanish.

Keywords: time, calendar, Shakespeare,Twelfth Night, solstice, gender, lunar cycle, mourning

John Battelle, "The Search" (Reseña)

Reseña del libro de John Battelle "The Search" - La Búsqueda: Cómo Google y sus rivales reescribieron las reglas de los negocios y transformaron nuestra cultura (Nueva York: Portfolio, 2005).

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A review, in Spanish, of John Battelle's book "The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture" (New York: Portfolio, 2005).

Soneto, espejo, reloj, bloc y libro

An analysis, in Spanish, of Shakespeare's Sonnet 77 from the point of view of the hermeneutics of rereading and the poetics of temporality.

Análisis del Soneto 77 de Shakespeare desde el punto de vista de la hermenéutica de la relectura y la poética de la temporalidad.

Out of Character: Narratología del sujeto y su trayectoria vital

Out of Character: Narratology of the Subject and Personal Life Stories
   
This paper argues the relevance of narratological concepts developed in literary analysis for the study and representation of personal life experience and narrative psychology. The findings of narrative psychology give new insights into the hermeneutic feedback between life and literature, or life and narrative. Several varieties and dimensions of personal life stories are sketched, and the importance of narrative anchoring, as well as of transformations, crises and turning points, is emphasized.

Note: Downloadable document is in Spanish.

Benefit of Hindsight: Polibio, Vico, Wilde y el emergentismo crítico

Benefit of Hindsight: Polybius, Vico, Wilde, and Critical Emergentism

This paper is a reading of Oscar Wilde's essay The Rise of Historical Criticism, analyzing Oscar Wilde's conception of critical historiography, with a particular focus on the issues of hindsight bias, on the hermeneutics of retrospection and on Wilde's position within the tradition of emergentist theory and cultural evolutionism.

Note: Downloadable document is in Spanish.

Ensayando el blog—Qué aporta tu post

Essaying the Blog - Your Post's Contribution
   
The first section of this paper explores an analogy between the generic characteristics of essay-writing and those of blogging, as modes of tentative, processual textual practice. Blogs open up a new age for essay-writing, in a medium well suited to develop some characteristics of the genre. The second section of the paper puts forward some parameters to gauge a number of dimensions of originality and relevance in blog posts, some of them specific and some non-specific to the medium.

Note: Downloadable document is in Spanish.

Keywords: Blogs, Essays, Process thought, Originality, Relevance, Networking

Ian McEwan, SATURDAY

A review, in Spanish, of Ian McEwan's novel SATURDAY (2005) understood as an allegorical portrait of Western middle-class everyday experience and life-stories within the historical and cultural context of the early 21st century.

La Noche de la Tempestad (Sobre la novela de César Vidal)

The Night of 'The Tempest' (On César Vidal's Novel)

This is a review, in Spanish, of César Vidal's novel La noche de la Tempestad (The Night of The Tempest, 2007), a biographical fiction centered on Shakespeare's relationship with his daughter Susanna (cast here in the role of Miranda) and with his wife Anne Hathaway, who is suspected of adultery. The review points out some historical inaccuracies, improbabilities and biases of Vidal's interpretation of Shakespeare's life.

Tecnologías de manipulación del tiempo

Technologies of Temporal Manipulation

This paper points out the technological continuum between information and communication technology (ICT) and narrative structuring, which is defined as the original multimedial technology of temporal manipulation. Its interdisciplinary perspective on the semiotics of temporal representation will be of interest to narratologists, communication theorists, and bloggers.

Note: Downloadable document is in Spanish.

Keywords: Time, Narrative, Media, Technology, Semiotics, Structuring, Communication, Experience, Film, ICT, Blogs;

Be Copy Now: Retroalimentación y dialéctica de la vida y el teatro en Shakespeare (Henry V, 3.1)

Be Copy Now: Dialectics and Feedback of Life and Theater in Shakespeare, Henry V, 3.1
 
This paper (in Spanish) offers an analysis of one of King Henry's speeches to his troops in Shakespeare's Henry V. The analysis focuses on the sexual imagery and symbolic association of war and aggresion, and on the reflexive, metadramatic dimension of this passage and of Shakespeare's theory of self and drama, thus drawing some further implications of the world as a stage metaphor, in the light of a theory of performativity, as developed by J. L. Austin and J. Hillis Miller.

Keywords: Shakespeare, Henry V, Theatricality, Performativity, Self; Semiotics, Metadrama

Hoodwinked by Aristotle

Hoodwinked by Aristotle
   
This paper is a narratological reflection on repetitive narrative, dealing with matters of point of view, narrative time, ontological status, and the role of retrospection in narrative structuring in storytelling and narrative discourse, in drama and in film, going back to the discussion in Aristotle's 'Poetics' and using the animated feature film 'Hoodwinked!' as a case study.

Note: Downloadable document is in Spanish.

Keywords: Narrative, Retrospection, Order, Storytelling, Drama, Aristotle, Poetics, Hoodwinked

Review of Viviane Serfaty's the Mirror and the Veil: An Overview of American Online Diaries and Blogs

Published in Atlantis 27.1 (June 2005): 117-22.

This is a review of Viviane Serfaty's landmark study of personal online diaries and personal blogs, with special attention to the micropolitics of self-representation in computer-mediated communication, the transformation of intimacy in the age of Internet, and the American tradition of individuality.

Keywords: Serfaty, Internet, Blogs, Individuality, Intimacy, Diaries, Virtuality, Computer-mediated_communication

Sobre la narración conversacional

On Conversational Narrative
   
This is a review essay on narrative phenomena in conversation, structured as a commentary and critique of Neal Norrick's book, Conversational Narrative (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2000). Written in Spanish.

Keywords: Narrative, Discourse, Conversation, Analysis, Norrick, Narratology

Deep-brained Sonnets

Deep-brained Sonnets
   
This paper proposes a reflexive reading of the authorial attitude and the autobiographical dimension of Shakespeare's Sonnets, with special reference to the concluding poem of the 1609 edition, "A Lover's Complaint", frequently neglected by critics of the Sonnets. The poem provides some additional evidence for a metapoetic dimension in the Sonnets' representation of authorial involvement and writing.

Note: Downloadable document is in Spanish.

Keywords: Shakespeare, Sonnets, A Lover's Complaint, Reflexivity, Speaker, Lyrical voice

Husband to Mrs Milton

Husband to Mrs Milton
   
This paper is a commentary of Robert Graves's historical novel The Story of Marie Powell, Husband to Mr. Milton, a historical novel set in the English Revolution. Special attention is paid to the implied authorial evaluations and to Robert Graves's personal investment in the story. There is an ambivalence in the figure of Milton both as a villain, the emblem of egolatry and authoritarian patriarchy, and as an abject self-portrait of the author.

Note: Downloadable document is in Spanish.

Keywords: Graves, Milton, Powell, Novel, Puritanism, Abjection, Narrator, Implied author

Acritical Criticism, Critical Criticism: Critical Interaction, Reframing, and Topsight

This paper theorizes critical readings from an interactional / argumentative perspective, providing a semiotic and phenomenological analysis of the scale ranging from consonant, "friendly" criticism, to dissonant, confrontational or "unfriendly" criticism. A number of key critical theories (by theorists such as G. W. F. Hegel, Oscar Wilde, Jacques Lacan, Erving Goffman, Norman Holland, Jacques Derrida, Stanley Fish, Paul Ricoeur, Judith Fetterley, John Muller, Alan Sinfield, and H. Porter Abbott) are examined in the light of this conception of criticism, and situated within the framework of interactional pragmatics, of the dialectics of communication, and of a semiotic theory of truth and of consciousness.

Keywords:
Criticism, Interpretation, Hermeneutics, Dialectics, Interaction, Hegel, Lacan, Goffman, Derrida, Ricoeur, Pragmatics

Mañana habrá sido escrito

Tomorrow Will Have Been Written
   
This paper reflects on "prophetic" elements in literature, analyzed from a psychoanalytic viewpoint in Pierre Bayard's book, "Demain est ecrit." Bayard's perspective is complemented with a critical analysis of the hermeneutics of temporal perspective, hindsight bias and retrospection from an interactional stance.

Downloadable article is in Spanish.

Keywords: Literature, Prophecy, Bayard, Wilde, Hermeneutics, Hindsight, Retrospection

Cyberspace Everting: "Spook Country", de William Gibson

Cyberspace Everting: William Gibson's "Spook Country"
     
William Gibson's novel "Spook Country" (2007) is analyzed with reference to contemporary discussions of the impact of technology on everyday life and on the articulation of reality and of subjectivity. The stylistic analysis of the novel is related to its conception of technologically mediated perception and thought.

Note: Downloadable document is in Spanish.

Keywords: Cyberspace, Technology, Interiorization, William Gibson, Topsight, Perception

La Visión del Templo: Espiritualidad Antieclesiástica en el Evangelio de Judas y la Batalla por la Realidad

The Vision of the Temple: Antiecclesiastical Spirituality in the Gospel of Judas and the Battle for Reality

The Gospel of Judas from Codex Tchacos (2nd century, pub. 2006) is set in the context of resistance to incipient structures of ecclesiastical power in Christianity, and in the tradition of anticlerical spirituality often associated to political resistance. In this discursive context a battle for reality often takes place: gnostic texts, like the resisting texts of other historical contexts, assume the ideological function of redefining public reality and rejecting the metaphysical assumptions of dominant groups along with the authority of their religious and political institutions.

Keywords: Gospel of Judas, Gnosticism, Church, Orthodoxy, Resistance, Reality, Matrix, Jones Very

Ackroyd's Shakespeare

A review, in Spanish, of Peter Ackroyd's biography of William Shakespeare ("Shakespeare: The Biography." London: Chatto & Windus, 2005).

Keywords: Shakespeare, Ackroyd, Elizabethan, Drama,

Harry Thompson, THIS THING OF DARKNESS: Anclaje narrativo

Harry Thompson, This Thing of Darkness: Narrative Anchoring
   
A review (in Spanish) of the novel THIS THING OF DARKNESS (2005) by Harry Thompson (1960-2005), a historical fiction on Darwin's Beagle voyage and the life of Captain Fitzroy. Special attention is paid to the novel's narrative anchoring of its events within a grand narrative of modernity and imperialism, of scientific and cultural development, and of human evolution at large.

Keywords: Novel, Narrative, Narratology, Harry Thompson, Darwin, Evolution, History, Fitzroy

Review of WE, THE OTHER VICTORIANS: CONSIDERING THE HERITAGE OF 19TH-CENTURY THOUGHT

Published in Atlantis, Vol. 27, No. 1, pp. 111-15, June 2005

    This is a review of "We, the 'Other Victorians': Considering the Heritage of 19th-Century Thought," a volume edited by Silvia Caporale Bizzini (Alicante, Spain: Publicaciones de la Universidad de Alicante, 2003. 215 p.). The volume sets out to read a number of contemporary cultural phenomena through the distorting lens of their analogues or forerunners in the nineteenth century, and on the whole manages to do it quite admirably. In this sense, it will be of interest not just to cultural critics working on issues such as modernity, consumerism, drugs, body technology, historical fiction and metafiction, etc.: it is also an interesting contribution to the postmodern critical genre of "retroactive rereading".

Keywords: Victorianism, Retrospection, Cultural studies, British culture, Cultural critique, Modernity,

El centro ausente: EL INNOMBRABLE de Beckett

Published in Atlantis 12.2 (1991): 45-64.

Análisis desconstructivo de la voz narrativa y de las estructuras metaficcionales y reflexivas en la novela de Samuel Beckett L'INNOMMABLE / THE UNNAMABLE.

Review of Recent Trends in Narratological Research, ed. John Pier.

Published in Miscelánea 22 (2000): 215-22.

A review, in English, of "Recent Trends in Narratological Research: Papers from the Narratology Round Table ESSE 4, September 1997, Debrecen, Hungary, and Other Contributions." Ed. John Pier. (GRAAT - Groupe de Recherches Anglo-Américaines de Tours, 21). Tours: Groupe de Recherches Anglo-Américaines de l'Université François Rabelais de Tours, 1999.

Keywords: Semiotics, narratology, narration, pragmatics

Sobre la competencia del narrador en la ficción

Published in Atlantis 19.2 (Dec. 1997): 77-102.

Mediante un estudio semiótico del concepto de competencia narrativa, este artículo propone tender un puente entre la narratología y la pragmática. Haciendo uso de diversos conceptos desarrollados por la pragmalingüística, además de la teoría de la modalidad de Greimas, se reexaminan nociones como las de enunciación narrativa, voz, y persona, y se propone una reinterpretación de las teorías clásicas de la narración. Las herramientas semióticas válidas para el análisis de la acción y los agentes en general se contemplan aquí como igualmente válidas para el estudio de la ficción narrativa.

Palabra(s) clave: Semiótica ; Narratología ; Competencia comunicativa ; Enunciación ; Voz narrativa ; Persona narrativa ; Acción ; Pragmática ; Pragmalingüística ; Narrador

Stanley E. Fish's Speech Acts

Published in Atlantis 12.2 (1991): 121-39.

Stanley Fish is the major American theorist of post-structuralist reader-response criticism, and contributed to the extension to literary studies of the pragmalinguistic theory of speech acts. His critique of formalist linguistics has also been influential. This paper criticises Fish's theories on the arbitrariness of literary meaning, starting from the shortcomings of his linguistic theory, and more specifically of his notion of the structure of the speech act. This critique includes a discussion of the concepts developed by Austin and Searle in their theories of speech acts.
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Stanley Fish es el máximo exponente norteamericano de la estética de la recepción postestructuralista, y se cuenta entre quienes extendieron a la literatura la teoría pragmalingüística de los actos de habla. También es célebre su crítica de la lingüística formalista. Este artículo critica sus teorías sobre la arbitrariedad del significado literario tomando como punto de partida las insuficiencias de su teoría del lenguaje, y más en particular la interpretación que hace Fish de la estructura del acto de habla, en una discusión de los conceptos desarrollados por Austin y Searle.

Review of Giambattista Vico's THE ART OF RHETORIC

Published in Miscelánea 19 (1998): 224-29.

This is a review of the English language edition of Vico's THE ART OF RHETORIC (INSTITUTIONES ORATORIAE, 1711-1741).  From the Definitive Latin Text and Notes, Italian Commentary and Introduction by Giuliano Crifò. Ed. and trans. Giorgio A. Pinton and Arthur W. Shippee. The review discusses the relevance of rhetoric in Vico's overall thinking, and more specifically the (limited) presence in this early treatise of the tropological theory of cultural development formulated by Vico in the SCIENZA NUOVA. There is also a commentary on the retrospective fallacy, already pointed out by Vico himself, which may make us read into an early text concepts which would be developed only later. In this sense, this paper is also related with my emphasis on the interpretive function of retrospection, expounded in other papers.
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Reseña de la edición inglesa de la retórica de Vico: The Art of Rhetoric (Institutiones Oratoriae, 1711-1741). Se discute en la reseña la relevancia de la retórica para el conjunto del pensamiento de Vico, y más concretamente la (limitada) presencia en este tratado temprano sobre retórica de la teoría tropológica del desarrollo cultural que formuló Vico. También se comenta la falacia retrospectiva, ya señalada por el mismo Vico, que nos puede hacer leer en un texto temprano conceptos que sólo se elaborarían más adelante. En este sentido, este trabajo también está relacionado con el énfasis en la función interpretativa de la retrospección que desarrollamos en otros trabajos.

Retroactive Thematization, Interaction, and Interpretation: The Hermeneutic Spiral from Schleiermacher to Goffman

Published in BELL (Belgian English Language and Literature) ns 2 (2004):  155-66.* (Special issue, "The Language/Literature Interface).

This paper examines some common concerns of hermeneutics, Bakhtin’s dialogism, American deconstruction and Goffman’s pragmatics of interaction, in order to provide a theoretical basis for literary criticism grounded on wider communicative processes, more especially on the retroactive dynamics of communicative interaction.

Adaptation, Appropriation, Retroaction: Symbolic interaction with HENRY V

In Books in Motion: Adaptation, Intertextuality, Authorship. Ed. Mireia Aragay. (Contemporary Cinema, 2). Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2005. 181-99.

This paper approaches adaptation from a hermeneutic perspective, specifically from a post-structuralist hermeneutics of discourse informed by symbolic interactionism. The intertextual relationship between a cultural product (e.g. a play) and its screen adaptation(s) is analysed as a performative intervention on an existing discourse formation which includes both the original product or text and the discourses using it, originating it, deriving from it or surrounding it. This intervention amounts to both an interpretation and an appropriation of the original text. Like other intertextual modes (translations, critical readings), adaptations produce a retroactive transformation of the original, not in se, but rather as it is used and understood in specific contexts and instances of communicative interaction. These theoretical issues are explored with a special focus on Shakespearean film adaptations, more specifically on the major Henry V films, Laurence Olivier’s (1944) and Kenneth Branagh’s (1989), and their treatment of violence and war in a variety of contexts. A case for a ‘resisting’ approach to Shakespearean adaptation is put forward.

A comparison between the French and RP English vowel systems

Undergraduate paper (1983)

This is a paper in phonology which describes and compares the vowel systems of standard (RP, "received pronunciation") British English, and standard French (with some observations on regional varieties).
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Se trata de un trabajo de fonología comparada, entre los sistemas vocálicos del inglés británico estándar (RP, "received pronunciation") y del francés (estándar, con algunos apuntes sobre variedades regionales).

Reseña de LITERATURE AS COMMUNICATION: THE FOUNDATIONS OF MEDIATING CRITICISM, por Roger D. Sell

Review in Spanish, published in Miscelánea 25 (2002): 183-188.

Roger Sell has developed a theory of linguistic politeness applied to literary communication. His line of research is therefore similar to mine in his attempt to build bridges between literary criticism and linguistic pragmatics. The book advocates a theory of literary criticism as mediation: mediation between author and reader,  or mediation between different ages, readings and cultural contexts. This is a crucial function of literary criticism which Sell considers has been neglected by literary theory in the later decades of the 20th century, though not always by critical practice. The purpose of this book is to provide the theoretical foundation which is now missing for literary criticism understood as a mediating activity.

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Roger Sell ha desarrollado una teoría de la cortesía lingüística aplicada a la comunicación literaria, siendo por tanto su línea de trabajo similar a la nuestra en su intento de crear puentes entre crítica y pragmalingüística. El libro plantea la necesidad de una teoría de la crítica literaria como mediación: mediación entre autor y lector, o mediación entre diversas épocas, lecturas y contextos culturales. Es una función de la crítica crucial y que Sell ve desatendida por la teoría literaria de las últimas décadas del siglo XX, si bien no siempre por la práctica de los críticos. El propósito de este libro es proporcionar el fundamento teórico del cual carece en la actualidad la crítica literaria entendida como actividad mediadora.

Science and Literature: Some Critical Parameters

Published in "Science, Literature, and Interpretation", ed. Francisco Collado. Zaragoza: Universidad de Zaragoza, 1991.

This paper has a double aim: to draw a general outline or the critical reflection on the relationship between science and literature in the past, and to classify the possible modes of inquiry into this subject at present. The main focus falls on some representative discussions of the relationship between science and literature in mid-20th century theorists (I. A. Richards, Max Eastman, Aldous Huxley, Roland Barthes...). I conclude that no 'true' relation between science and literature can be defined once and forever, due to several reasons. The first is that the relationships that we effectively discern change with time. Therefore, a definition of the relationship between literature and science must be a history of the relationship between literature and science. Moreover, as both science and criticism develop, we manage to discern new kinds of relationships between both disciplines. And great writers constantly appear and modify through their work the panorama we tried to describe. The diverging channels of of science and literature are the result of the division and specialization of labour and discourse that we call 'progress'. New scientific perspectives on literature, new literature which takes scientific doctrine in stride, or new accounts of the way in which science is still 'poetic' are also the result of this division of discourses, and a further complication of their relationship.

The Poetics of Subliminal Awareness: Re-reading Intention and Narrative Structure in Nabokov's "Christmas Story"

Shorter version published in 'European Journal of English Studies' 8.1 (2004): 27-48.

This paper puts forward a theory of the integration of the different levels of communicative interaction in narrative fiction, from the activation of proxemic elements at the level of the action, to the interaction between author and reader, as well as the figured interaction between their textual personae. The paper shows how through specific stylistic practice, Vladimir Nabokov is able to exploit the complexity of this integration of multiple levels of representation in a semiotic continuum, in order to achieve highly elaborate communicative aims. This account is developed through a detailed argumentation which takes into account the actual reception of "A Christmas Story" and the way this reception history demonstrates Nabokov's use of a stylistic technique consistent in a calculated subliminal activation of specific reading paths (intertextual associations, activation of short-term memories, etc.). A possible relationship between reflexive narrative structures and specific modes of neural processing associated to the generation of conscious phenomena is also suggested.

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Este artículo desarrolla una teoría de la integración de los diversos niveles de interacción comunicativa en la ficción narrativa, que va desde la activación de elementos proxémicos al nivel de la acción hasta la interacción entre autor y lector, así como entre sus imágenes textualizadas. Mostramos cómo una determinada práctica estilística, la de Nabokov, es capaz de explotar con fines comunicativos altamente elaborados la complejidad de esta integración de múltiples niveles de representación en un continuo semiótico. Desarrollamos esta tesis con una argumentación detallada que tiene en cuenta la recepción efectiva de "Un cuento de navidad", y la manera en que esta recepción evidencia la técnica estilística de Nabokov consistente en la activación subliminal calculada de tramas de lectura determinadas (intertextualidad, creación de memoria local, etc.). También apuntamos la posible relación entre las estructuras reflexivas de la narración y modalidades específicas de procesamiento neurológico asociadas a la generación de los fenómenos conscientes.

Understanding Misreading: Hermenéutica de la relectura retrospectiva

Paper presented at the IX Susanne Hübner Seminar, "Pragmatics of Understanding and Misunderstanding" (Universidad de Zaragoza, Departamento de Filología Inglesa y Alemana, Nov. 1996.

Quiero presentar una serie de razonamientos críticos pertenecientes a diversas escuelas y relativos a diversos objetos de estudio, para ilustrar un elemento común, un elemento que quizá se haga visible conforme avanzamos, y quizá emerja con mayor claridad de la misma confrontación entre esos razonamientos. Quizá sea un ejercicio parecido al de trazar líneas entre estrellas para formar una constelación, permiténdonos ver una figura que no era visible antes. Es bien sabido que una constelación como forma existe sólo en la mente de quien la ve; pero las ideas sueltas que vamos a ver podrían formar parte además de un sistema más sustancial, una galaxia de intérpretes quizá. El elemento común que une a estas reflexiones críticas es el tema de la relectura retrospectiva de una narración y sus consecuencias para la hermenéutica. Podríamos sintetizar estas consecuencias diciendo que el paso del tiempo todo lo cambia, hasta el pasado mismo.

Gender, I-deology and Addictive Representation: The Film of Familiarity

Introduction to the volume "Gender, I-deology: Essays on Theory, Fiction, and Film." Ed. Chantal Cornut-Gentille D'Arcy and José Ángel García Landa. (Postmodern Studies, 16). Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 1996.

The book "Gender, I-deology" is a collective volume of essays on the representation of gender difference, and on the ideological implications of the conventions or representational strategies used in texts. It includes essays on film, literature, and critical theory, written from a number of perspectives associated to feminist criticism. My contribution is the introduction to the volume, and deals with the main guidelines of discourses on gender. I examine a number of social contexts, institutions, behavioral and linguistic practices which contribute to the discourse on gender: sexuality, essentialist and constructivist social theories, ideas about masculinity and femininity, individuality, the organization of work, the discourse of love, of family and marriage, the discourse of history, and last but not least the linguistic implications of generic difference and the ideological role of feminist criticism in the development of a critical awareness with respect to gender roles and stereotypes. I expound a theory of the role of stereotypes and of their unthinking use, as a relevant element in the present economy of gender. The paper has a linguistic-semiotic dimension, as it relates aspects of the use and generation of discourse and aspects of critical discourse analysis, viewing both from the standpoint of a theory of social processes which contribute to the formation of gender as a cultural, ideological and discursive object. There is, thus, an analytic continuum linking critical discourse and the social construction of gender through semiotic practices.

Colonialism and Post-Colonialism

from. A Bibliography of Literary Theory, Criticism and Philology. http://www.unizar.es/departamentos/filologia_inglesa/garciala/bibliography.html by José Ángel García Landa. (University of Zaragoza, Spain). Colonialism and Post-Colonialism. Top ten. Early works. ...

History of Scotland

The Holocaust/The Shoah/Nazi Genocide

Gothic Novel; Horror Fiction

Early Modern English History

Poetry: Authorship. The Poet.

On Samuel Beckett

Ireland: History

William Shakespeare: Hamlet

A bibliography on William Shakespeare's HAMLET. From my BIBLIOGRAPHY OF LITERARY THEORY, CRITICISM AND PHILOLOGY, http://tinyurl.com/garcialanda