Reading 'La Regenta': Duplicitous discourse and the entropy of structure: Duplicitious Discourse & the Entropy of Structure (Purdue University Monographs in Romance Languages) - Softcover

Sieburth, Stephanie Anne

9781556190704: Reading 'La Regenta': Duplicitous discourse and the entropy of structure: Duplicitious Discourse & the Entropy of Structure (Purdue University Monographs in Romance Languages)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1556190700 ISBN 13: 9781556190704

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1990

Criticism of La Regenta has until recently focused on the text's plot as an extraordinarily coherent and convincing fictional world. Stephanie A. Sieburth demonstrates that the devices which produce order in the text are counterbalanced by an equally strong tendency toward entropy of meaning. The narrator is shown to be duplicitous and unreliable in his judgments on characters and events. Without an omniscient narrator, readers must interpret for themselves the complex intertextual structure of the novel. Saints' lives, honor plays, and serial novels each provide partial reflections of Ana Ozores' story. The text becomes a collage of mutually reflecting segments which, like Ana in her moments of self-doubt and madness, ultimately question the function of language and of any overriding interpretation or meaning.

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