| One of the salient features of Spanish American narrative in the last twenty-five years has been a rethinking of the interplay of history and literature. This dissertation focuses on Mexican author Carlos Fuentes' interest in history and his incorporation of it into seven of his novels: La region mas transparente (1958), La muerte de Artemio Cruz (1962), Cambio de piel (1967), Terra Nostra (1975), La cabeza de la hidra (1978), El gringo viejo (1985), and Cristobal Nonato (1987). It addresses the appropriation, functioning, accessibility, and process of history that Fuentes offers as representative of the Spanish American endeavor to take another look at history through literature.;Using Michel Foucault's paradigm for classifying discourse and characterizing the relationship between author and text, Chapter One and Two examine the appropriation of historical discourse and its structural importance within these seven novels.;The thematic functions of history are identified in Chapter Three as a reflection of Fuentes' quest for Mexican identity and of his view on the writing process. It is seen that Fuentes equates history to the paternal figure within the familial paradigm, as proposed by Octavio Paz, of the Mexican's search for self. The consequences of such an equation are taken up in a discussion of the significance of the marginalization of the maternal in its relationship to history. In addition, the way in which history is treated by Fuentes to parallel his theory of writing, which converts it to a linguistic construct, is also discussed.;Chapter Four poses the problem of how this historical discourse speaks to the reader by evaluating the vision that Fuentes gives of history from a gender-based feminist perspective. It is observed that Fuentes maintains a traditional phallocentric narrative-voice while attempting a non-traditional feminine encoding of historical discourse.;The final chapter synthesizes the perspective on history that Fuentes offers in his novels by using the analyses from the previous chapters to sketch the vision of historical process that Fuentes' discourse represents. It is suggested that Fuentes' implicit proposal of causal historical progress runs contrary to his explicitly unorthodox manipulation of history as evidenced in the seven novels studied. |
