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El discurso autobiografico femenino en la Nueva novela Espanola
Abstract
Entitled "El discurso autobiografico en la nueva novela espanola", my dissertation constitutes an approach to the new discourse of feminine autobiography in the Spanish novel of the last two decades. Based in current theory, the study develops an analysis of five novels all of which were published in the 1980's. This decade in particular produced many novels that make use of an autobiographical mode that better allows the affirmation of the subjective "I", provokes an undecidability between literature and life, and, as an exhibitionist, places the reader in the position of voyeur, thus establishing a new pact between reader and author. The study offers a detailed analysis of the most prominent aspects of each text, an analysis that is fundamentally a personal reading of the novels. Although I apply theoretical principles, my primary purpose is to present an original approach that provides new perspectives to the field of autobiography. These writers revert to the first person narrative with the purpose of approaching feminine experience in a new way, further defining themselves through writing. The intimate narrative "I" privileges the subjectivity that permeates a large portion of their narration. It is this autobiographic form that allows the author to appropriate her own voice through which she empowers herself and recovers an autonomous identity. The result of the analysis of these works reveal that, through the mechanisms of autobiography, the female protagonist of the current autobiographical novel in Spain takes possession of the word and transforms herself into the subject of the discourse wherein she constructs her own space and seeks a new and different word that expresses the confluence of feminine sensibility and sexuality in mother and lover. However, a series of distinctions among the uses of the first person narrative must be established. The intentions of the implicit author that underly each one of these novels are what individualizes a work from another. There are texts that, through the first person narrative, introduce the author's or narrator's past episodic experience, and there are others that insinuate themselves into the autobiography of the narrating protagonist and investigate the nature of the autobiographical act. The analysis of each one of these novels is a creative study whose dual purpose is, in the one hand, to establish a unifying thread, and on the other, to verify the various differences that individualize each one of the texts.
Subject Area
Modern literature|Romance literature|Womens studies|Literature
Recommended Citation
Vazquez Castro, Maria, "El discurso autobiografico femenino en la Nueva novela Espanola" (1997). ETD collection for University of Nebraska-Lincoln. AAI9734645.
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/dissertations/AAI9734645