Historicidad y Escritura: Problemas de la Poetica del Ensayo. El Caso de Salvador Elizondo

Abstract

This dissertation belongs to the territory of the undefinition: the essay, as a literary gender with no limits, is the core of the analysis though their sub-gender “periodical essay”, a theoretical complex literary form inside Opinion Journalism as a gender, where sometimes the periodical essay is located for research purposes. To go deeper into the above, this study focus on Mexican writer Salvador Elizondo’s periodical essays, who was a strange case in Hispanic American literature in 20th Century, not just because of his written style, but for the idea he has about his own works: he preferred to call them “experiments” instead “literature”.

The next pages will analyze a poetic problem on periodical essay focused on two main circumstances: time and space, for these are the most important constituents of every literary text. The analysis will take place on the book Contextos, by Salvador Elizondo, first appeared on Excelsior, a newspaper from Mexico City, between 1971 and 1973. I will conduct a variorum study, and then, a phenomenological approach to this essay, to understand how those two circumstances work on the poetic construction of the periodical essay.