La Guerra Del Fin Del Mundo De Mario Vargas Llosa: Un Estudio Transtextual. (Spanish Text) (Brazil, Peru, Portugal).

Abstract

This study focuses on the novel La guerra del fin del mundo by the Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa. Until now, critics have emphasized the importance of only one source, Os sertoes, in the writing of this book. I content that despite the relevance of E. da Cunha's writings, many of these critics have neglected to uncover a large repertoire of sources that play a prominent role in the critical underst and ing of this novel. Furthermore, even though a few critics have pointed out the relationship between O sertoes and La guerra del fin del mundo, they have failed to discover its profound intertextual implications. Thus, for the first time, I methodically examine this relationship in its varying aspects which to date have not been considered or studied in detail. Given the diversity of sources utilized by Vargas Llosa and incorporated in his work through different intertextual methods--allusion, imitation, quotation, stylization--, this dissertation addresses three central subjects directly related to the transtextual aspects of La guerra del fin del mundo: (1) the relationships between the LGFM (hypertexte) and its sources (hypotexte); (2) the relationships between Vargas Llosa's theories on the novel as a genre, and his particular ideas about the LGFM (metatexte); and (3) the relationships between LGFM vis-a-vis other literary and historiographical genres (architexte). The thesis is divided into fourteen chapters. Chapters one through four focus on the theoretical grounding of transtextuality, on the identification of sources and , on the study of characterization of two major personages and other minor figures. Chapters five through eight investigate the ideological dialogic discourse generated by the unmerging voices of three main characters. Chapters nine through twelve contain an examination of the medieval world embedded in different structural levels of LGFM. In the light of the chilvaric novel and Vargas Llosa's metatextual ideas, these chapters form a part of the dissertation which account for architextual as well as interpretational problems. Finally, chapters thirteen and fourteen examine how the novelist selects what is "tellable" from the historiographical sources to include it in the novel. Also, by contrasting two distinct types of voices, one inherent to historiography--the monologic voice-- and one intrinsic to the novel itself--the dialogic voice--, this study aims at responding to some basic questions on the nature of the novelistic text.