Bøger af Mario Valdes

Drawing on the works of a wide range of authors, including Proust, Tolstoy, Woolf, Lorca, Solzhenitsyn, and Fowles, Vald�s explores the phenomenon of truth-claims from two perspectives: textual semantics and hermeneutics.

This book brings together, in the spirit of dialogue, the arguments on both sides of the most important issue in literary criticism today. It will be of interest to all concerned with textual theory, regardless of which literature are considered.

Acción Nacional was a small Chilean nationalist political grouping that emerged as a result of the frustrated presidential candidacy of Jorge Prat Echaurren in 1964. After the parliamentary elections of 1965, in which the right-wing won a meagre parliamentary representation, it launched a proposal to regroup conservatives, liberals, nationalists and non-Marxist independents into a single political grouping. This is an approximation of its brief but significant existence.

In the intensity of current theoretical debates, critics and students of literature are sometimes in danger of losing sight of the most basic principles and presuppositions of their discipline, of the underlying connections between attitudes to truth and the study of literature. Aware of this danger, Mario Valdes has taken up the challenge of retracing the historical and philosophical background of his own approach to literature, the application of phenomenological philosophy to the interpretation of texts. Phenomenological hermeneutics, Valdes reminds us, participates in a long-standing tradition of textual commentary that originates in the Renaissance and achieves full force in the work of Giambattista Vico by the middle of the eighteenth century. Valdes characterizes this tradition as the embodiment of a relational rather than an absolutist epistemology: its practitioners do not seek fixed and exclusive meanings in texts but regard the literary work of art as an experience that is shared within a community of readers and commentators, and enriched by the historical continuity of that community. Valdes demonstrates the vigour of the tradition and community he has inherited in a brief survey of such relational commentators as Vico, Juan Luis Vives, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Unamuno, Croce, and Collingwood. He elaborates the contemporary contribution of phenomenological hermeneutics to the tradition, referring particularly to the work of Paul Ricoeur. In arguing for a living and evolving community of criticism, he contests both the historicist imposition of closure on texts and the radical scepticism of the deconstructionists. And in reading of works by Octavio Paz and Jorge Luis Borges, he offers a model for the continuing celebration of the living literary text.

This source book provides answers to many diverse questions about Unamuno and his works, for example: Which newspapers did Unamuno write in? How interested was he in literature from the United States? Did he read Kierkegaard in Spanish? What about Kant? Did he read Catalan?

In Cultural Hermeneutics, Mario J. Valdes offers a synthesis of the hermeneutic philosophies of Miguel de Unamuno and Paul Ricoeur.

Vald s gives his views of literature, cinema, and art to unravel what he calls, 'the imaginative configuration of the world, the cultural phenomenon of making sense, poetic sense, of life.'