On the Impact and Import of A Writer's Reality (original) (raw)
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Hybrid Storyspaces: Redefining the Critical Enterprise in Twenty-First Century Hispanic Literature
hispanicissues.umn.edu
Without a reader, literature does not exist. At the heart of the most primitive of fictions, according to Antonio Muñoz Molina, is someone telling a story and someone listening to it (20). Literature, therefore, is a communicational act with an emitter (the writer), a receptor (the reader and the reading public), and a message that is the work itself. From a legal point of view, the work and the author exist even without a recipient; the mere expression of an original idea fixed in a tangible medium generates intellectual property. 1 However, literary texts are generally directed at a reader upon whom the author depends financially (Senabre 16). I refer here not only to the reader who purchases a book in a shop or online-whom we could call the end consumer-but to the reader upon whom the author depends until publication: the editor. The Internet has changed this structure. Among the many changes the Internet has produced in the editorial field, there are two that are especially significant: first, the possibility that the author may become his or her own editor. With the help of print-ondemand services, the author-editor can constantly adjust the number of copies to cover actual demand for the book. The second change is the ease with which the author and reader can communicate. The creation of blogs has facilitated a more fluent communication among authors and their readers that goes beyond the role of the Web as an alternative and increasingly powerful marketing channel for publishing houses. In the present essay I will focus on this second change. I will explore how the Internet is challenging the traditional model of production, communication and reception of literary works. More and more, the fruitful interaction of authors and readers leads to the print publication of books in the Spanish language based on materials originating on the Internet. In some limited and interesting cases, the author has offered readers the opportunity HIOL ♦ Hispanic Issues On Line ♦ Spring 2012 NAVARRO ♦ 124 to complete or add pieces to the puzzle that constitutes the original work, to act as collaborators, as producers and coauthors of his or her work. As a starting point, I will examine the figure of the author, who constitutes readership, and how their relationship and collaborative process has evolved up until the advent of the digital era. Following that analysis, I will explore the changes that have ocurred in their relationship and why the so-called hybrid economy, an economy based on the combination of commercial and community interests, represents an old but also new and necessary counterpoint to the unidirectional, author-reader relationship fostered by multinational publishing and media conglomerates. My study of the transition from blog to book format will demonstrate how blogs have ultimately gone to waste, and how, conversely, wikis seem to be building a bridge capable of spanning the profound breach between the analogic and the digital publishing worlds. It also will expose a certain lack of interest on the part of big publishing houses in the new culture of collaboration; socalled literary blogs seem to exist as a means by which media conglomerates pursue certain business ends. As in the Gospel according to John, the beginning is the word. Literature originates in oral tradition, where tales are transmitted from one generation to the next throughout the spoken word. Oral cultures preserve certain information by means of participatory and communal practices. Compared to spoken texts, writing, according to Walter Ong, "separates the knower from the known and thus sets up conditions for 'objectivity,' in the sense of personal disengagement or distancing" (45). The spoken word has the peculiarity of allowing the different transmitter to modify the narrative, introducing small variations to the text. This explains the existence of diverse versions, one or more of which will subsequently be put down in writing. In truth, the first authors we can attest to are transcribers, compilers and commentators of oral narrative, writers that. according to Michael North, did not aspire to anything more than a "derivative authority" (1380). This is the realm of Benedictine monks such as Gonzalo de Berceo, on one hand, and minstrels on the other, brought together despite their differences by the letter and the word, versification and theme. In essence, the material on which both feed has a common root: oral tradition. Both ends of the communicative act can eventually exchange roles. The emitter can become the receptor, and vice versa. The relationship is more dynamic than in written cultures. Going back to Muñoz Molina's comment, one relates and the other listens, but one also repeats, and in that reproduction of the message, the narrative is modified. The receptor becomes the emitter, but also something else: because of the additions to the text, the receptor also becomes an author, another link in the chain of authorauditors that comprise oral tradition. Modern concepts of authorship arise in tandem with the advent of Gutenberg's printing press, though author and editor are often confused up
Anales Galdosianos, 2021
Modern Spanish Literary and Cultural Studies have seen a recent turn from traditional appreciations of Spain as a stunted nation suffering from a belated and incomplete modernization and its cultural productions as imitative derivations of British and French models. Instead, recent scholarship shifts the focus of analysis away from notions of lacking and inadequacy to yield more productive readings of Spanish cultural production as a valuable example of the distinctive manifestations of modernity beyond Hegel's "heart of Europe". Mary L. Coffey and Margot Versteeg's co-edited volume, Imagined Truths: Realism in Modern Spanish Literature and Culture, utilizes this approach as a fresh take on Spanish realism, the most accomplished authors and works of which have been long omitted from mainstream examinations of modern Western Literature. As a number of contributions in this volume demonstrate, however, a more nuanced analysis of Spain's literary and cultural production reveals a mastery of the complexities of realism and a unique engagement with modernity that not only parallel those of its Northern European counterparts, but in some cases also anticipate cultural, aesthetic, and scientific developments taking place in the late nineteenth century and beyond. The aims of this collection align with the scholarship of editors Coffey and Versteeg, whose work consistently calls into question the marginalization of both Spain within European Literary and Cultural Studies as well as of those works and genres often neglected within Hispanic Studies themselves. Versteeg's books, for example, reclaim the value of those cultural productions often considered of lesser scholarly value despite their ideological and cultural impact, including illustrated periodicals (Jornaleros de la pluma), género chico plays (De fusiladeros y morcilleros), and Emilia Pardo Bazán's foray into theater (Propuestas para reconstruir una nación). Coffey likewise has demonstrated the role of costumbrismo in the construction of (post-) imperial and (proto-) national identity within a transatlantic framework, and her recent book, The Ghosts of Colonies Past and Present: Spanish Imperialism in the Fiction of Benito Pérez Galdós, emphasizes how Spain's position on the brink of postcolonial nation affords its fin-de-siècle literature a unique, rather than imitative, position in relation to those of England and France. Fittingly, Imagined Truths engages literary forms, texts, and time periods outside the bounds of realism in its strictest aesthetic and historical definition-including British quixotic fiction in translation (Jaffe), intimate epistolary correspondence (Patiño Eirín), twentieth-century theatrical adaptation (Gies), and postwar detective fiction (Sieburth), among others-as a means of considering the movement's antecedents and legacies as well as its networks of influence in Spain and abroad. Particularly notable in this respect is the volume's engagement with costumbrismo, the scholarly appreciation of which was once limited to its documentation of the idiosyncrasies of Spanish culture in the nineteenth century. A number of chapters in Imagined Truths demonstrate the genre's anticipation of realist strategies or, in the case of Joyce Tolliver's "Colonialism, Collages, and Thick Description: Pardo Bazán and the Rhetoric of Detail", the realist incorporation of costumbrista elements imbued with layers of historical and cultural meaning associated with the metropolitan experience of empire and its end. Especially pathbreaking among these new
Tlatelolco's Persistent Legacy: A Comparative Analysis of Three Mexican Novels
Bulletin of Latin American Research, 2005
This article analyses how three Mexican novels, published between 1971 and 1999, respond to the effects of political violence on national identity. It focuses particularly on fictional representations of state-sponsored, politically motivated murder and on how survivors negotiate a social space forever changed by unsolved crimes. The article concludes that an important consequence of political violence is that it undermines the validity of systems of representation that once seemed capable of portraying the national community. Each of the three novels interpreted here adopts a different stance regarding literary language's relationship to its ever-changing sociopolitical contexts.