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Aesthetics, Ethics, and Politics in Donoso's El jardín de al lado

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Ricardo Gutierrez Mouat
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Abstract

This paper seeks to elucidate the complex interaction of aesthetics, ethics, and politics in El jardín de al lado by using a heuristic and dialogic approach—that is, by counterpointing Donoso's novel and one of its implicit subtexts, Thomas Mann's “Death in Venice.” Focusing on the aesthetic contradiction between modernism and postmodernism brought on by the rise of the culture industry, El jardín de al lado dramatizes an artistic crisis that has ethical and political implications. The narrator's traditional discourse of value is subverted by the ethics and aesthetics of the marketplace, which create contradictions (bourgeois versus bohemian subjectivity, production of the text versus reception of it) similar to those Mann deals with in “Death in Venice.” Ultimately, El jardín de al lado is a response to political crisis from the standpoint of autonomous literature.

Type
Hispanic Cluster
Information
PMLA , Volume 106 , Issue 1 , January 1991 , pp. 60 - 70
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1991

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