"El Crotalon" en la tradicion lucianesca. [Spanish text].
Item
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Title
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"El Crotalon" en la tradicion lucianesca. [Spanish text].
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Identifier
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AAI9009734
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identifier
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9009734
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Creator
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Garcia Osuna, Alfonso Jose.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Isaias Lerner
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Date
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1989
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Language
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Spanish
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Literature, Romance
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Abstract
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The true art of El Crotalon is to be found in the way its author combined the rhetorical/satirical mechanisms inherited from Lucian with his erasmian ideology to produce a didactic work which is unique in its time. The outwardly lucianic text gives no evidence of a sustained ideology or of the author's true intentions, and as such, the reader enters its sphere without a compass, having his expectations as to what he is reading constantly negated. This is the key to the author's new approach to imparting a lesson: if his readers are to develop pragmatic resources with which to face the world, if they are to learn to make choices based on sound moral principles, then the didactic text must provide a testing-ground in which to err, as well as a way to recognize the error. This the author accomplishes through a negative dialectics which continuously disrupts the meaning which the reader ascribes to the text.;This approach forces the author to retire from the horizon of possibilities, to refrain from providing his readers with a guide through his text. In fact he remains anonymous, allowing his characters to come through the text "unprocessed", with all their limitations, acting within the frame of their self-interest and expressing their circular, self-gratifying opinions as universal truths. They take over, so to speak, the functions traditionally reserved for the author. The lucianic text before us, then, is not a documentary record of something that exists or has existed: it reveals itself as a reformulation of an already formulated reality, to be broken down and reassembled by the reader using the tools of his own moral standards.;The result is that this text, unlike its predecessors in the long tradition of didactic literature, is born of the awareness that art is not the representation of a whole truth and can make no universal claims. El Crotalon has shown us that literature can no longer be regarded as the representative image of such totalities as morals, ethics and truth, but that one of its basic functions is to reveal the deficiencies inherent in such claims.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
