El discurso y la palabra. Retórica, persuasión y neología en la narrativa española de vanguardia

This book is a study on the deep changes that Spanish prose fiction underwent in the early twentieth century; a fiction conceived not as a literary product, but as a privileged place where to convey a new conception of reality, a new perception of human consciousness of the power of speech and a new conception of speech itself. In the first part, Notas marruecas de un soldado: entre vanguardia y argumantación, it is analyzed the rhetorical-discursive organization in Giménez Caballero’s novel. This part emphasizes, on the one hand, how the novel pays a constant attention to the expressive possibilities of the Castilian; and, on the other hand, how it anticipates the typical elements of Falange political discourse. The ideological content of its pages, in fact, affects the elocutio. Besides, the subjective perspective through which the word is narrated and described; the modalities of enunciation – imperative, interrogative and exclamatory – that implicate the presence of an interlocutor; the almost obsessive repetition of certain figures of speech... reveal a pragmatic intention that coincides with the topics of the argumentative discourse. The second part, Ramon, o la Alquimia de las palabras, consists of an analysis of neologisms find in a corpus of nine novels, written between 1921 (La viuda blanca y negra) and 1961 (Piso bajo). The classification shows that Gómez de la Serna’s peculiar vision of reality also involves the renewal of expressive means. For this reason, every word can undergo a transformation process or can mix itself with other lexical items.