La rebeldia de la letra. Escritura, viaje y teoria en la novela espanola y argentina del siglo XX

Abstract

This dissertation uses an interdisciplinary approach to analyze and problematize the intersections of writing, theory and travel in a body of contemporary literature from Argentina and Spain. In the first chapter, I examined the paths of three travelers, Jose Ortega y Gasset, Victoria Ocampo and Witold Gombrowicz, who despite their dissimilar experiences, produce a form of writing closely linked to movement and becoming. Through the medieval topos of homo viator, which conceives the human as pilgrim and life as a voyage of deciphering, I examine the practice of writing as a constant movement requiring the writer to embark on a journey through what Martin Heidegger called, the holzwege. In so doing, the writer must exit the polis, and from the position of the outsider, the writer will be able to write and do the work of theory. In subsequent chapters, I analyze writing spaces in the novels of Enrique Vila-Matas and Hector Libertella and how those places are, in fact, traveling spaces that question any concept of fixed or permanent belonging. By proposing a practice of writing that is self-reflexive and preoccupied with the possibilities of writing, I look at the responses of Libertella and Vila-Matas to the twentieth century nihilistic malaise that leads to silence. Ultimately, my goal is to construct a theory of writing that portrays the practice of writing as mobile, fluid, and desobedient to national formations and literary traditions.