Juan Goytisolo: The Author as Dissident

Alison Ribeiro de Menezes

• Publisher: Tamesis Books
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN:
  9781855661097
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781846154072
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

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

Table of contents

• FRONTCOVER
• CONTENTS
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INTRODUCTION: AUTHORSHIP AND DISSIDENCE
• PART I. THE DISSIDENT VOICE
• 1 Authoring the Self: Coto vedado and En los reinos de Taifa
• 2 Canonizing Dissidence: Four Decades of Essay-Writing
• PART II. IDENTITY AND ALTERITY
• 3 Memory, History, and Identity: Señas de identidad and Reivindicación del Conde don Julián
• 4 Migrating South, Wandering East: Juan sin Tierra and Makbara
• PART III. DIVERGENCES AND CONVERGENCES
• 5 The Author as Voyeur: Paisajes después de la batalla, La saga de los Marx, and El sitio de los sitios
• 6 The Author as Mystic: Las virtudes del pájaro solitario and La cuarentena
• PART IV. AUTHORSHIP AND DISSIDENCE REVISITED
• 7 The Author as Intertextual Critic: Las semanas del jardín, Carajicomedia, and Telón de boca
• WORKS CITED
• INDEX