Description:
There exists today a large number of studies on Luis Goytisolo’s narrative. Very few of them though are dedicated to the metafictional aspect of his novels, even though it constitutes the main focus of his most important novels, the works that comprise the tetralogy Antagonía. This study purports to discuss the importance of metafictional narrative in Spanish literature, and Luis Goytisolo’s invaluable contribution to the development of that phenomenon. Before the 1970s, Spanish narrative usually tended to reproduce the social milieu. Camilo José Cela’s La familia de Pascual Duarte (1942) and Carmen Laforet’s Nada (1945), among others, have been cited as expositions of the hard social reality of the postwar years.

These novels, Sobejano notes, are ‘un primer paso hacia un realismo existencial que pronto habría de generar otro modo de realismo social.’! The main concern of the social novel, which Sobejano defines as ‘un tipo de novela que tiende a hacer artísticamente inteligible el vivir de la colectividad en estados y conflictos a través de los cuales se revela la presencia de una crisis y la urgencia de una solución’ (299), was contemporary society. Narrative discourse was perceived as an instrument for communicating an accurate perception of external reality to the reader. Mimetic representation of reality was foregrounded and representational accuracy was rarely questioned. Language was conceived as a system of signs whose signifiers pointed non-problematically to their referents.
- FROM INTRODUCTION

The author discusses the importance of metafictional narrative in Spanish literature and Luis Goytisolo’s invaluable contribution to the development of that phenomenon.


CONTENTS:

Acknowledgements......7

Introduction…..8

1. Self-conscious discourse and the spanish novel…..13

II. Recuento, realism and structural poetics......24

Writing and reading literature: Los Verdes de Mayo hasta el Mar and La Colera de Aquiles......43

IV. Teoria del Conocimiento: Discoursive strategies within point of view......76

V. Concluding remarks…...96

Note....98

Selected Bibliography......103