WILLIAM CONRAD MAISCH. Narrative Experimentation in the Fifteenth-Century Sentimental Novels (Under the direction of Frank Dominguez)


ABSTRACT

This dissertation seeks to prove that the constituent factors of the modern novel are already clearly discernable in the narrative experimentation of the fifteenth-century Spanish sentimental novels. To this end, I have formulated an eclectic methodology, freely appropriating aspects of diverse contemporary approaches, particularly those represented by the projects of Walter Ong, Gérard Genette, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Wolfgang Iser. I hypothesize that all written narratives engage their readers in ways unique to writing, through various levels of dialogue: 1) "narrative dialogue," by which I mean the often complex layers of communication between narrative agents and their addressees, both external and inscribed; 2) "intertextual dialogue," a dialogue between the text and other texts realized by, and dependent upon, the reader; and finally, 3) "linguistic dialogue," consisting of both "inter-linguistic" and "intra-linguistic dialogue," which I understand as overt or implicit dialogue between national languages (referred to by Bakhtin as polyglossia) as well as between styles or registers of a single language (referred to by Bakhtin as heteroglossia).
In the present work, I examine narrative, intertextual and linguistic "dialogue" in the following late fifteenth-century texts: Juan Rodríguez del Padrón's Siervo libre de amor; the anonymous Triste deleytaçión; Diego de San Pedro's Arnalte y Lucenda; and, Juan de Flores' two novels, Grisel y Mirabella and Grimalte y Gradissa. Finally, I examine how several of these innovative narrative strategies are reflected in analogous aspects of Fernando de Rojas' Celestina and Cervantes' Don Quijote. While I do not intend to show that the novelas sentimentales should be considered either great or modern novels, I do argue that their authors' decided manipulation of the basic dialogical constituents of all written discourse demands that these works be considered in a comprehensive study of the European novel. Like the modern novel, sentimental discourse has a built-in, self-questioning dialogicality that ultimately endows it with the potential to be read as literary parody -- that is, a literature that is aware of itself and aware of its readers, and that continually questions its readers as it questions itself.