EL NEGOCIO DE LA MEMORIA: ESCRITURA Y SUJETO AUTOBIOGRAFICO EN LA LITERATURA DE LENGUA ESPAÑOLA (1970-2005)

EL NEGOCIO DE LA MEMORIA: ESCRITURA Y SUJETO AUTOBIOGRAFICO EN LA LITERATURA DE LENGUA ESPAÑOLA (1970-2005)Elver Sergio Ramírez Franco, PhDUniversity of Pittsburgh, 2005This dissertation examines one of the most dynamic fields of recent literary production in Spanish language: autobiographical discourse. It focuses on the notions of subjectivity, identity, temporality, truth, gender, race, ideology, image, memory, body, eroticism and ideology as represented in the symbolic space of the autobiographical discourse of ten key authors (Reinaldo Arenas, Jorge Luis Borges, José Donoso, Salvador Elizondo, Gabriel García Márquez, Margo Glantz, Juan Goytisolo, Pablo Neruda, Severo Sarduy, Mario Vargas Llosa) of twentieth century literary tradition in Spanish/Latin American Literature. The theoretical perspective of this work is postructuralist. The dissertation consists of 4 chapters. The first one provides the frame for the analysis and defines concepts such as subjectivity, identity, temporality, representation, memory, vraisemblance and truth. It incorporates concepts proposed by Walter Benjamin, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Paul de Man, James Olney, Paul Ricoeur, and Gayatri Spivak in order to map these categories. The second chapter studies the relationship between autobiography and image, and autobiography and representational techniques. This chapter pays attention to the narratological strategies with which the authors, who are at the same time the narrators and the main characters of their texts, re-create their image through their writing. The third chapter explores the connections between body, erotic exclusions, power relations and homoerotic writing ("Homographesis") as the social constitution of identity through -and against- those inscriptions as the components of social identity. This chapter focuses on three writers: Reinaldo Arenas, Juan Goytisolo, and Severo SarduyThe last chapter attempts to show the underlying phallocentric ideology which operates in the process of subjectification of "straight" writers, and the complex negotiations of identity during a period marked by the emergence of a global society, tele-technology and simulacrum.The results are summarized in the final conclusions