Mathematics – Logic
Scientific paper
Oct 1998
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=1998phdt........26r&link_type=abstract
Thesis (PhD). YALE UNIVERSITY, Source DAI-A 60/05, p. 1584, Nov 1999, 260 pages.
Mathematics
Logic
Alejo Carpentier, Carlos Fuentes, Eduardo Galeano, Spanish Text, Cuba, Mexico, Uruguay
Scientific paper
This dissertation studies the evolution of the historical novel in Spanish America during the second half of the twentieth century, focusing on the following works: El siglo de las luces (1962) by the Cuban Alejo Carpentier, Terra nostra (1975), by the Mexican Carlos Fuentes, and Memoria del fuego (1982-1986), by the Uruguayan Eduardo Galeano. The thesis' aim is to describe, analyze and suggest the causes for the breakdown of the modern historical narrative, decade by decade, from the sixties to the present. The line between what the dissertation identifies as modern and postmodern historical novels is drawn by radical changes in the structure of the aesthetic representation of history. Taking as its point of departure the implicit and sometimes explicit rules or poetics that conditioned the historical novel as a subgenre since Scott and Manzoni, the thesis explores how the new, postmodern novel, shatters the twin columns that supported that modern model: verisimilitude and linearity. This is the thesis's main work on the formal or aesthetic sphere of the recent Spanish American historical novel. But the aesthetic is intimately tied to two other spheres: the cosmological and the ontological (political and moral). If, on the one hand, the catastrophic state that the postmodern novel exhibits (the acceleration of its narrative particles, as it were) reveals itself as the mirror image of postmodern paradigms such as the fragment and catastrophe itself, on the other, its chaotic liberation reflects the historical ``spirit'' within it is produced. This is so because not only in its content, but also in its very form, the postmodern novel is part of that catastrophe. The postmodern novel's chaotic text posits the disintegration of all versionas of the emancipation project, or of the pursuit of an identity, that (the Cuban Revolution included) is closely allied to the totalizing drive that characterizes the spirit of modern times. The dissertation's hypothesis is that there is a link between the epistemological model of modern natural science and the modern historical novel. Hence that there is also a link between the postmodern paradigms (fragment, catastrophe) and the recent postmodern novel. The expansive, entropic, disconfluous and unpredictable universe of the ``New Physics'' is one with the nuclear catastrophe in Terra nostra, and with the fission-like explosion that pulverizes into minuscule units Galeanos's trilogy. The postmodern novel signals the end of the ontological project of man as subject for the good, which was correlative with the project of reason as the unifying and ordering force, prevalent since the Enlightenment. Criticism has noted that there has been a radical change in the historical novel, but has failed to speculate about its possible causes, not venturing beyond a mere catalogue of features. This dissertation aspires to go further by attempting to put forth the ideological, philosophical and even scientific reasons behind the change.
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