Fragmentos de Sombra: Una Biograf?a Intelectual de Fernando Gonz?lez

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2014-07-01

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Fifty years after Fernando Gonz?lez?s death (1895-1964) his books are still widely read literary circles and his cultural legacy is vibrant, but academic approaches to his work are rare and they focus on a limited number of his works. This dissertation is meant to fill that void. The method follows two roads. The first one uses the academic conceptual machinery, a deep archival research, and an exhaustive reading of secondary sources, in order to apply them on the reading of Gonz?lez?s entire work. The second road assembles a bridge between academic methods and the readers of Gonz?lez?s work beyond academy.

These two roads revealed a pattern of fragmentary thought in Gonz?lez's oeuvre. It is around this feature that the recurrent themes of his work are interwoven: fragmentation itself, a critique of borders and limits manifested in his resistance to the genres and academic disciplines, the body, the road, the shadows, ambiguity, uncertainty, and the aesthetic experience. This sui generis collection of subjects demanded the incorporation of theory from many different fields such as philosophy, literary theory, physics, logic, biology, history, psychology, politics, anthropology, among others.

All these fields were already within the fabric of Gonz?lez?s writing. Gonz?lez, just like Don Quixote, took to the road to show the world that he was not willing to accept a truth that is not made for him. So fragmentation rises as a way preventing the world from having a single truth, religion, genre, philosophy, race, or political system. Each of the fragments is a single battle against windmills.

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