Abstract

BLANCO RAMOS, Roberto Antonio. Between “disorder” and progress: A critique of the Ecuadorian political modernization project in the novel La Vida del ahorcado (novela subjetiva), by Pablo Palacio. Comunicación [online]. 2020, vol.29, n.2, pp.31-42. ISSN 1659-3820.

During the first decades of the 20th century, the dominant trends in Hispanic American narrative were linked to a framework of representation that sought to reflect the reality of its time, one that tended to represent the inequalities generated by the development of nation-states and capitalism. Nevertheless, during this same period, the assimilation of the historical avantgarde, gave rise to a narrative with new ways of approaching literary reality.

This context sees Ecuadorian writer Pablo Palacio publish the novel Vida del Ahorcado (Novela Subjetiva), which criticizes the project of Ecuadorian political modernization in the late 19th and first three decades of the 20th century, based on a fragmentary narrative vision of modernity’s contradictory symbolic order. In this sense, this literary study proposes to analyze the way in which this critique was constructed by examining the main avant-garde stylistic axes present in the novel.

The research is divided into four sections. The first analyzes investigations related to the critical study of Palacio literature, while the second section develops a historical contextualization of the socioeconomic and political reality of the modernization project. The third on the other hand examines the main avant-garde trends contained in the novel. Finally, in the fourth section, the proposed discursive analysis is carried out.

This study was the final project for the course “Crisis del realismo y fundadores de la Nueva Narrativa,” of the master’s degree in Hispanic American Literature, taught at the Complutense University of Madrid from 2018 to 2019.

Keywords : Latin American literature; narrative; modernization; politics; Ecuador; nation.

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