Discourse Analysis As Sociocriticism: The Spanish Golden Age

In Discourse Analysis as Sociocriticism, Antonio Gomez-Moriana brilliantly applies contemporary literary theory to classical texts of the Spanish Golden Age, including Lazarillo de Tormes, Don Quijote, Tirso de Molina's Don Juan play, and Columbus's Diary. Gomez-Moriana begins by affirming that Saussure had originally intended semiology as a study of signs in social life before proceeding to focus on the study of system and structure. Gomez-Moriana argues that the structuralists subsequently misread Saussure and focused on the synchrony of signs abstacted from the literary text rather than on the historical and social developments represented by philology, the field of study that sheds light on cultural history. In Discourse Analysis as Sociocriticism, Gomez-Moriana fuses history and semiotics. "Gomez-Moriana's skillful handling of literary theory is matched by his thorough scholarship and excellent knowledge of history....Whether he is dealing with Foucault to discuss, for example, the changing criteria of verisimilitude in Occidental literary discourse, or with Greimas's 'semantic expansion principle,' or with Lejeune's notion of the autobiographical pact, or, for that matter, with any other issue of importance to his analysis of a specific text, it is clear that Gomez-Moriana has done his homework." Nicholas Spadaccini, University of Minnesota

Table of Contents:
Semiotics and philology in text analysis; The subversion of ritual discourse - an intertextual reading of Lazarillo de Tormes; Intertextuality, interdiscursiveness, and parody: On the origins of the narrative form in the picaresque novel; Autobiography and ritual discourse - the autobiographical confession before the Inquisition; Narration and argumentation in autobiographical discourse; Evocation as a literary procedure in "Don Quijote"; Discourse pragmatics and reciprocity of perspectives: The promises of Juan Haldudo ("Don Quijote" I,4) and of Don Juan; The antimodernization of Spain; Narration and argumentation in the chronicles of the New World; The emerging of a discursive instance - Columbus and the invention of the "Indian"; The (relative) autonomy of artistic expression - Bakhtin and Adorno.

About the Author :
Antonio Gomez-Moriana is professor of comparative literature at the University of Montreal and chair of Spanish and Latin American Studies at Simon Fraser University. He has published several books and articles in Spanish, German, English, and French on philology and social change, literary history, semiotics, and discourse analysis.