A function with mobiles and tentetiesos of Marcos Carías or tension between modernity and postmodernity in narrative writing

Abstract

The paper offers an interpretive analysis of the novel A function with mobiles and tentesiesos (1981) by the Honduran Marcos Carias. The analysis proceeds through a semiotic description of textual components (discourse structure), which are discussed with reference to critical reviews of the work (Arias, A., Bermudez, H., Torres, C., Umana, H.), and specially with reference to the “concept of 'language novels'” by Angela Dellpiane and the characteristics of postmodern aesthetics that Frederic Jameson raises. The main argument holds that although the novel opens up the discourse that cross the society to give a fragmented and fluid image (in line with the postmodern aesthetic), that way of representation doesn't suppose a waiver to the intention or to the construction of meaning by the author, but which comes to be a realization of the vanguard claims of a total novel that was able to construct images that realized the complexity of reality (in the tradition of aesthetics and the draft knowledge of modernity).

In this sense, the paper focuses on the tension in the narrative writing (as a typical dilemma between intellectuals and artists of the decade of 1980) between the heritage of modernity, which relied on the insight to drive the world, and trends of the postmodernism to the dissolution of the subject and reason into social befall.

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5377/rct.v0i7.1807

Revista Ciencia y Tecnología No. 7, diciembre 2010: 105-121