WOUNDED FICTION: THE DECONSTRUCTION OF THE 'PROPER' IN VALLEJO, STEVENS, AND CHAR

The thesis focuses on three twentieth century poets: Cesar Vallejo, Wallace Stevens, and Rene Char. It relies on conceptual perspectives developed by Jacques Derrida, whose radical theories of interpretation owe much to the work of thinkers like Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger. The intent is twofold: to contribute to an understanding of these particular poets and, in so doing, to demonstrate the pertinence of deconstructionist theory for a detailed interpretation of literary texts. The analysis involves the application of Derrida's concepts of "differance," supplement, and pharmakon to the works of all three poets.;The poets have in common the deconstruction of what Derrida calls "the law of the proper." The discussion of Vallejo's posthumous poetry concerns the poet's mounting of an ironic critique of philosophical discourse. Vallejo satirizes this discourse inasmuch as it is representative of an ultimately futile will to comprehend and resolve the contradictory dimensions of human experience. The examination follows a close reading of several poems, such as "Panteon," "Las ventanas se han estremecido . . . ," "Voy a hablar de la esperanza," and others. In Stevens' work, the subversion of the proper is analyzed in terms of the poet's intricate and distinctive meditation on the supplementary logic of metaphoric language. Stevens is shown to affirm the resistance of an irreducibly language figurative level of meaning to the stricture of a restituted proper meaning. Along with the interpretation of several shorter poems, there is an extended explication of the long poem "Credences of Summer" and of the closing cantos of "Notes toward a Supreme Fiction." In the case of Char, a limited number of poems, such as "Suzerain," "A la sante du serpent," and "Centon," provide the basis for a demonstration of how in his poetry the identity of a proper name or meaning is only discoverable as a profound contradiction, riddle, or enigma; this issue is finally examined in terms of the reader's encounter with the poetic text, which is perceived by the poet as a difficult, but creative sphere of contest.