Discordant Identities and Disjunctive Authority in a Perverse Narrative: Julieta Campos’ Tiene los cabellos rojizos y se llama Sabina

• Author(s) / Creator(s)

  • Beard, Laura J.

• Introduction: In The Spanich American Regional Novel: Modernity and Autochthony, Carlos Alonso argues that the movement away from modernity became discursively and politically institutionalized as a continual search for identity that provided that foundation for an intrinsically Spanish American cultural enterprise. His more recent book, The Burden of Modernity: The Rhetoric of Cultural Discourse in Spanish America, seeks to document: "[...] that moment in which the gesture of allegiance and obeisance toward the modern is eschewed - however ambiguously or paradoxically - by recourse to a given textual practice that renders that gesture problematic (Alonso 1998: v)." Conglating the two meanings of modernity - both a concept or aesthetic ideal and a socioeconomic reality or phase of Western historical development - he looks at the specifics of the Spanish American writer's relationship to modernity, arguing that the "[...] intrinsic discordances and disjunctions, which are characteristic of all writing, become more salient in the Spanish American text given the particular nature of the rhetorical situation in which it is inscribed (ibid.: 5)." Alonso's provocative discussion of modernity and postmodernity in the Spanish American context provides certain points of departure for a discussion of the problematics of identity and authority in Julieta Campos' Tiene los cabellos rojizos y se llama Sabina, a postmodern novel whose intrinsic discordances and disjunctions are perhaps its most salient features."

• Date created

  2003-01-01

• Subjects / Keywords

  • Campos, Julieta
  • Identity
  • Spanish American identity
  • Latin American literature
  • Authority

• Type of Item

  Chapter

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/R38W38H5W

• License

  © 2003 L. J. Beard. This version of this article is open access and can be downloaded and shared. The original author(s) and source must be cited.