Translators occupy the smallest print in the history of literature. They are more than the impersonal, they are the anonymous. With few exceptions, the name of the translator appears in small type on the credits page; it rarely appears on the title page, and almost never on the cover. It is as if the act of reading a text in a language different from the original were a most shameful activity. “Good manners” are that institutionalized behavior that allows this shameful activity to be kept secret; everyone pretends not to see what everyone else knows (even the translator knows that...

The production of reality today—that is, the production of those discourses that constitute it and that make consensus possible—demands enlargement and adaptation of the technology of the past into today’s “mass communication media.”

The reason is unmistakable: the expansion of the capitalist market, the Industrial Revolution, and the progressive antagonism of scientific discourses in the configuration of reality accelerate the transformation of reality itself. The expansion of forces of production and the multiplication of specifically scientific and technological codes constitute two aspects of a movement that expands the order of the commodity into the most unimaginable segments of...

I shall begin with something evident. Museums—in particular, fine arts museums—have become in modern societies, at least in those that became what they are under the revolutionary impulse of Enlightenment philosophy, an exemplary space in which unanimous commemoration can take place. They are a space where the secular ritual occurs, through which a community sanctions a number of cultural achievements. Although these achievements bring an individual character to the community, at the same time they are supposed to link it to the whole of humanity in the realm of the spirit. These spaces have been designed for the...

One of the features most commonly attributed to a work of art is the union, inseparability, or lack of distinction between form and substance, expression and content. Even though I think that this concept is well explained by some authors (especially Lotman and Mukarovsky), perhaps it would be appropriate to consider it from a pragmatic perspective, for only in that way may we appreciate its true relevance and its influence on the general functioning of literary phenomena. The unity of form and substance is not an autonomous value in the literary text that can be appreciated in itself. It is...

Realism not only has shaped important schools and periods in the evolution of world literature, but also has constituted a basic constant in all literature since the formulation of the principle of mimesis in thePoeticsof Aristotle. For this reason, it is one of the central points of literary theory most in need of a clarification of its conceptual limits. This effort, in turn, would contribute to the task—often opposed by various authors—of correcting the imprecision, polysemia, and ambiguity with which the realist principle is applied.

This is no easy task, given the diverse implications surrounding realism,...

The lyric origins of the poem, as set down by linguistic poetics, have been established on the theoretical grounds that the poem is a linguistic object of a special type. Indeed, as a measure of its “poeticity” (poeticidad), one might describe the poem as having been derived from those rhetorical-elocutive origins (figures and tropes) of structural ordering (parallelism, coupling, isotopy, and the like) that I have discussed elsewhere (Pozuelo-Yvancos,La teoría del lenguaje literario). Yet until the mid-1970s, very few authors concerned themselves with the pragmatic specificity of the poem, or in other words, with poetry as a special form...

In a previous work, dedicated to atheoría¹ of reading, I investigated the paradoxical movement that characterizes the relationship between the language of literary theory and that of literature. One of the core chapters of that work noted the characteristics of identity and difference that mediate between text and metatext. In dealing specifically with the question of difference, the problem of defining language or the literary text was brought to the foreground, a classical problem that was not addressed at the time because the investigation wandered along other paths. Nevertheless, the way was prepared for understanding that the question about...

The narrative carried out by a subject that addresses itself and takes itself as the protagonist of its own story raises a series of questions about the relationship between subjectivity and temporality, about the construction of narrative time, and also about the place that narrative occupies in the process of building identity.

Recent studies of temporality in narrative texts resort, almost inevitably, to the distinction between time of the narration and time narrated. However, we must bear in mind that these temporalities do not usually exist as independent and separable entities. Such a dichotomy is intended to account for the...

Jorge E. Jinkis, in his fundamental article “A Topical Distinction: The Subject of the Enunciation and the I of Discourse,” follows the split present in Lacanian writings between enunciation and utterance. He analyzes the different conceptual value that Roman Jakobson’s shifter, that is, that which articulates utterance with true enunciation, has in Lacanian psychoanalysis. In order to account for the gap between enunciation and utterance, Lacan introduces a first distinction that splits the “I” of the discourse of the subject from the enunciation. What is at stake in Lacanian argumentation is, in short, that the discovery by psychoanalysis of the...