Lucille Kerr
Reclaiming the Author: Figures and Fictions from Spanish America.
Duke University Press, 1992. First edition. 0822312271 xiv/228 pages.
Volume, measuring approximately 6.25" x 9.25", is bound in light brown cloth, with stamped red lettering to spine and front cover. Book displays light shelfwear. Binding is firm. Interior is clean and bright.
"The recent fiction of Spanish America has been widely acclaimed for its experimental and revolutionary qualities. "In Reclaiming the Author," Lucille Kerr studies the sources of power of this newly emergent literature in her detailed examination of the critical concept of "the author." Kerr considers how Spanish American narratives raise questions about authorial identity and activity through the different figures of the author they propose. These author-figures, she maintains, both complement and contradict notions of authority that exist outside of the world of fiction.
By focusing on works by well-known Spanish American authors—Cortázar, Donoso, Fuentes, Poniatowska, Puig, and Vargas Llosa—Kerr shows how the Spanish Americans have formed a radical poetics of the author. Her readings demonstrate how exemplary Spanish American texts, such as "Rayuela," "Terra nostra," and "El hablador," call into question the author as a unitary or uniform, and therefore unproblematical, figure. Individually and together, Kerr's readings reclaim "the author" as a complex critical concept encompassing diverse, conflicting, even competitive roles."