Las novelas de Oleza. Aspectos de su modernidad en el contexto de la prosa mironiana de madurez.

Barbera-Farran, Frederic (2002) Las novelas de Oleza. Aspectos de su modernidad en el contexto de la prosa mironiana de madurez. In: Miró, novelista. II Simposio Internacional Gabriel Miró :. CAM, Alicante, pp. 97-111. ISBN 84-688-7362-4

Abstract

This essay must be understood as a further development of the research carried out for 'Gabriel Miró' and Catalan Culture' (Barbera, Univeristy Press of the South, 2004), which concentrates on the forging of Miró's literary language in the context of his poetics. In the present publication Miró's literary evolution is traced, including his narrative works as well as his articles, and his epistolary (see Barbera and Ian Macdonald (eds), forthcoming). The objective is to explain aspects of modernity in the Oleza novels ('Nuestro Padre San Daniel' and 'El obispo leproso') in the context of Miró's latest works. The analysis focuses on the specific context of the author's literary thought, understood in the wider framework of the innovative trends in western narratology in the first third of the 20 Century. Via an analysis of Miró's literary language, some of the elements are probed that make these two novels (taken together) a modern narrative piece, beyond their strictly stylistic dimension. Thus the chapter starts with an assessment of the novels' lexical idiosyncrasies, and moves on to interpret the nature of some metaphorical and comparative processes and their narrative implications. The critical approach adopted, although wide-ranging, is underpinned by close reading and shares its understanding of language with structuralism.