Mario Valdes – författare

Literary criticism today is dominated by the debate about whether texts have a fixed identity with established meaning or a variable identity with changing meaning. The very nature of what the critic does and what he can provide for his readers is being questioned; the challenge to the traditional view comes especially from the various theoretical formulations which, agreeing on the need to go beyond formal analysis, have been called post-structuralism. At the core is the fundamental question of what a literary text is. Identity of the Literary Text addresses his question.In five sections – textuality and intertextuality, textual deconstruction, hermeneutics, analytical construction, and ideological perspective – fifteen scholars, many with world-wide reputations, consider such key aspects of literary criticism as the structure of texts, the relationship between text, author, and reader, the psychological and sociological implications of literary texts, and whether or not a general theory of literary criticism is possible.This book brings together, in the spirit of dialogue, the arguments on both sides of the most important issue in literary criticism today. It will be of interest to all concerned with textual theory, regardless of which literature are considered.

In literary texts writers express their views on a great variety of issues, some of which they take seriously, others of which they treat with levity. Even in those statements to which cultural circumstances assign a transcendent meaning there is a wide range of commitment from marginal to central concern in the discursive context. Mario J. Valdés calls these assertions truth-claims.Drawing on the works of a wide range of authors, including Proust, Tolstoy, Woolf, Lorca, Solzhenitsyn, and Fowles, Valdés explores the phenomenon of truth-claims from two perspectives. One, textual semantics, deal with the content of a given truth-claim; the other, hermeneutics, is concerned with the reader’s interpretation of the truth-claim. In the reading of the text the subject making the truth-claim is not the author or a collective abstraction but rather an enunciating voice or voices. The subject enacting the truth-claim is the reader in his or her textual encounter with the discourse. Everything that happens in a text is recognizable and ultimately knowable because it is made possible as a world constituted through language by a reader. The subject-matter of truth-claims is therefore not the physical data of the world that corresponds to the statement, but rather the reader’s accessibility and relationship to those data within the lived world of language.

Paul Ricoeur is one of the most important modern literary theorists and a philosopher of world renown. This collection brings together his published articles, papers, reviews, and interviews that focus on literary theory and criticism.The first of four sections includes early pieces that explore the philosophical foundations for a post-structural hermeneutics. The second contains reviews and essays in which Ricoeur engages in debate over some of the central themes of literary theory, including figuration/configuration and narrativity. In the third section are later essays on post-structuralist hermeneutics, and in the fourth, interviews in which he discusses text, language, and myths. Mario Valdés provides an introduction to the literary theories of Paul Ricoeur and the works in this collection particularly. He also includes a complete bibliography of Ricoeur's works that have appeared in English.

In Cultural Hermeneutics, Mario J. ValdÉs offers a synthesis of the hermeneutic philosophies of Miguel de Unamuno and Paul Ricoeur, a dialectical method that has formed the basis for many of ValdÉs’ own studies in comparative literature. As ValdÉs explains in these insightful essays, what Unamuno and Ricoeur shared in their hermeneutic studies was a theory of interpretation in which the meaning of a work of art comes into existence through the dialectical relationship between its creator and its readers, listeners, or viewers. Contextualizing this hermeneutic concept as it appears in the works of both philosophers, Cultural Hermeneutics presents the basis for a profound understanding of the arts.

In the intensity of current theoretical debates, critics and students of literature are sometimes in danger of losing sight of the most basic principles and presuppositions of their discipline, of the underlying connections between attitudes to truth and the study of literature. Aware of this danger, Mario Valdés has taken up the challenge of retracing the historical and philosophical background of his own approach to literature, the application of phenomenological philosophy to the interpretation of texts. Phenomenological hermeneutics, Valdés reminds us, participates in a long-standing tradition of textual commentary that originates in the Renaissance and achieves full force in the work of Giambattista Vico by the middle of the eighteenth century. Valdés characterizes this tradition as the embodiment of a relational rather than an absolutist epistemology: its practitioners do not seek fixed and exclusive meanings in texts but regard the literary work of art as an experience that is shared within a community of readers and commentators, and enriched by the historical continuity of that community. Valdés demonstrates the vigour of the tradition and community he has inherited in a brief survey of such relational commentators as Vico, Juan Luis Vives, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Unamuno, Croce, and Collingwood. He elaborates the contemporary contribution of phenomenological hermeneutics to the tradition, referring particularly to the work of Paul Ricoeur. In arguing for a living and evolving community of criticism, he contests both the historicist imposition of closure on texts and the radical scepticism of the deconstructionists. And in reading of works by Octavio Paz and Jorge Luis Borges, he offers a model for the continuing celebration of the living literary text.

This volume contains an edited selection of the papers read at the International Colloquium on Interpretation of Narrative held at the University of Toronto, 24 to 27 March 1976 by the Graduate Programme in Comparative Literature. The papers in the first part all deal with the methodology of text-oriented criticism; the papers in the second brng to the discussion a fundamental agreement and acceptance of the hermeneutic method and reception theory. It is most fitting that these proceedings should end with an attempt to find the holistic identity of interpretation of narrative. The papers in the third part were prepared for the colloquium and were published in part afterwards in Critical Inquiry and each assisted in the inquiry.

Miguel de Unamuno (d. 1936), one of the most influential of modern Spanish writers and thinkers, has been described as Spain’s richest mind of the twentieth century. This book provides a bibliography of the approximately 5,700 books in his private library in Salamanca and includes most of his readings and acquisitions. Also listed are at least 2,000 more books from a personal catalogue kept by Unamuno, which have been collated with the present collection.Since Unamuno read in vast and indiscriminate quantities, an organized approach to his library is essential for determining the full dimensions of his intellectual stimulation. An introductory essay by Mario J. Valdes makes an original contribution to the study of Unamuno by analysing intensively the methodology used in his readings, and relating them to his thought.This source book provides answers to many diverse questions about Unamuno and his works, for example: Which newspapers did Unamuno write in? How interested was he in literature from the United States? Did he read Kierkegaard in Spanish? What about Kant?  Did he read Catalan? An appendix correlates the catalogue of readings to the Vergara edition of Unamuno’s Obras completas.