Mario Valdes – författare

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. 

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.

Professor Valdes presents a theory of literary criticism based on phenomenological philosophy – primarily the work of Husserl, Ingarden, Merleau-Ponty, and Ricoeur. His basic argument is that literary texts are inexhaustible sources of imaginative creativity for their readers, and, further, that this openness does not inhibit serious commentary but rather enhances the critic’s possibilities of exchange, dialogue, and intellectual enrichment. He argues for a system of classification of narrative texts according to phenomenological principles in which form is considered as a heuristic device established for the purpose of understanding the nature of literary expression. The only critical approach he holds to be untenable is that which lays claim to a definitive interpretation of a text, for such an approach would mean the death of the literary text as a creative source.

Valdes’ presentation progresses from a statement of premises, through the construction of a critical approach, to a concluding historical generalization about literature. To introduce the richness of the Hispanic literatures and to elaborate an historical overview of one literary tradition, he has chosen to examine texts from Hispanic literatures exclusively, notably those of Unamuno and Cervantes.

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.