Banca de DEFESA: MARIA STELLA GALVAO SANTOS

MILESTONES OF THE NEW LATIN AMERICAN HISTORICAL NOVEL IN EL SIGLO DE LAS LUCES

Nueva Novela Histórica; Baroque; Latin America; Carpentier; El Siglo de las Luces.

The novel El Siglo de las Luces, by Alejo Carpentier, addresses the social and political impact of the French Revolution in the Antilles, transposing to the region the turbulence and the game of uncertainties and questions that marked the Enlightenment or Enlightenment (XVIII). It tries, from the first pages, to portray the echoes of European history in the Caribbean Sea, and also to record the incipient pro-independence movements of the then colonies. Our proposal is to read it having as its main theoretical reference the study of the North American theorist Seymour Menton (1993), who established six criteria to classify the Nueva Novela Histórica (NNH) in Latin America, of which El Siglo, published in 1962, appears as the inaugural narrative of this strand of literary analysis. In this context, this dissertation unfolds into three main approaches, which condense the topics proposed by the so-called new historical approach. The first turns to the conceptual link between literature and history thought by Menton and other theorists, examining the way in which it is particularized in this novel; then, we address the first element of Bakhtin's aesthetics present in Menton's analysis – intertextuality –, made explicit by references to the Spanish painter Francisco de Goya. Finally, we demonstrate the ways in which Carpentier uses the Bakhtinian concepts of carnivalesque and parody in his novel and how, in doing so, he adds explicitly baroque elements to the narrated story. This study therefore points to a methodological path [via NNH] that enables a close dialog between a segment of literary theory and the analyzed novel, in this case, El Siglo de las Luces.