Juan José Saer and the borders of the narrativity
Keywords:
Juan José Saer, El limonero real, Parallel microworlds, Narrativity, Narrative Sequences
Abstract
This article is an analysis of the narrative techniques in Juan José Saer’s novel El limonero real and the short stories “Memoria olfativa” and “Recuerdos”. We pay special interest in certain descriptions and actions where time seems to expand and an “instant” becomes an indefinite sequence. We use for our analysis the theories of H. Porter Abbott, Mitchel Resnick y Steven Johnson, specially with the term of “parallel microworlds”; these are moments where a character stops the linear time of the narration to tell us about a situation that moves away from the central axis of the story. Therefore, it is our belief that “narrativity” structures not only the logic of stories (oral and written), but also of reality. Saer uses this same belief to constitute within his literary work a multiplicity of “parallel worlds” or “instances” that can be “narrativized” in different ways.
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Buisine, Alain. “Un cas limite de la description: L’énumération: L’éxemple de Vingt mille lieus sous les mers”. La description: Nodier, Sue, Flaubert, Hugo,
Verne, Zola, Alexis, Fénéon. Eds. Philippe Bonnefis y Pierre Reboul. Lille: Presses Universitaires de Lille, 1981, 81-102.
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Eliade, Mircea. Aspects du mythe. Paris: Gallimard, 1963.
Ferguson, Niall, ed. Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals. London: Papermac, 1998.
Frankel, Felice C. y George M. Whitesides. No Small Matter: Science on the Nanoscale. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009.
Geertz, Clifford. “The Growth of Culture and the Evolution of Mind”. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books, 2000, 55-83.
Gottschall, Jonathan y David Sloan Wilson, eds. The Literary Animal: Evolution and the Nature of Narrative. Evanston/Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2005.
Hamon, Philippe. Introduction à l’analyse du descriptif. Paris: Hachette, 1981.
Herman, David, ed. Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences. Stanford, California: Center for the Study of Language and Information, 2003.
Iser, Wolfgang. The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response. Baltimore/London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980.
Johnson, Steven. Emergence: The connected lives of ants, brains, cities, and software. New York: Scribner, 2001.
Löwith, Karl. Meaning in History. Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press, 1967.
Porter Abbott, H. “The Evolutionary Origins of the Storied Mind: Modeling the Prehistory of Narrative Consciousness and its Discontents”. Narrative, núm. 8, 2000, 247-256.
_____. The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
_____. “Unnarratable Knowledge: The Difficulty of Understanding Evolution by Natural Selection”. Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences. Ed. David Herman. Stanford: Center for the Study of Language and Information, 2003, 143-162.
_____. “Narrative and Emergent Behavior”. Poetics Today, núm. 29, 2008, 227-244.
_____. “Narrating Conversion in and Age of Darwinian Gradualism”. Storyworlds: A Journal of Narrative Studies, núm. 2, 2010, 1-18.
Prince, Gerald. A Dictionary of Narratology. Lincoln/London: University of Nebraska Press, 2003.
Propp, Vladimir. Morphologie du conte. Paris: Seuil, 1970.
Resnick, Mitchel. Turtles, Termites, and Traffic Jams: Explorations in Massively Parallel Microworlds. Cambridge/Massachusetts-London: The MIT Press, 1997.
Ricardou, Jean. Le nouveau roman. Paris: Seuil, 1978.
Saer, Juan José. Cuentos completos (1957-2000). Buenos Aires: Seix Barral, 2006.
_____. El limonero real. Buenos Aires: Seix Barral, 2006.
Sábato, Ernesto. Sobre héroes y tumbas. Buenos Aires: Seix Barral, 2011.
Turner, Mark. The Literary Mind. New York-Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.
_____. “The Cognitive Study of Art, Language, and Literature”. Poetics Today, núm. 23, 2002, 9-20.
_____. “Double-scope Stories”. Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences. Ed. David Herman. Stanford: Center for the Study of Language and Information, 2003, 117-142.
Virtanen, Tuija. “Issues of text typology: Narrative – a ‘basic’ type of text?” Text, núm. 12, 1992, 293-310.
Zunshine, Lisa. “What is Cognitive Cultural Studies?”. Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies. Ed. Lisa Zunshine. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010, 1-33.
Published
2020-01-06
How to Cite
Anibal G. Biglieri. (2020). Juan José Saer and the borders of the narrativity. Amoxcalli, Revista De Teoría Y Crítica De La Literatura Hispanoamericana, 3(5), 9-48. Retrieved from http://rd.buap.mx/ojs-dm/index.php/amox/article/view/6
Section
ARTICLES
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