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Project

The essays of Carlos Fuentes: a rhetorical-discursive approach.

This project aims to offer the first systematic study of the essays written by Carlos Fuentes, a major contemporary Mexican author mainly studied for his fictional work. The goal of the project is to describe the rhetoric of the essay as practiced by Fuentes, with attention to its discursive embeddedness and internal diversity. Instead of examining Fuentess essays as secondary to his novels, I will consider them as a corpus with a relative autonomy. From a rhetorical point of view, the project intends to map the specificity of Fuentess essayistic discourse, which integrates numerous fictional devices. By analyzing the narrative techniques and stylistic features that the essayistic and the fictional form have in common, the project seeks, from a more literary-theoretical perspective, to contribute to the understanding of the relation between the essay and the fictional as two genres or modes. Furthermore, the essays provide important material to examine Fuentess self-representation or ethos (as they frequently draw upon personal experiences) as well as his role as cultural mediator in the Mexican literary and intellectual field of his time.
Date:1 Oct 2011 →  30 Sep 2014
Keywords:Discourse analysis, Essay, Ethos, Mexican literature, Carlos Fuentes
Disciplines:Language studies, Literary studies, Theory and methodology of language studies, Theory and methodology of linguistics, Theory and methodology of literary studies, Other languages and literary studies