The writing of Leopoldo Maria Panero : subjectivity and multiplicity.

Abstract

This thesis performs post-structuralist reading of the Spanish poet Leopoldo Maria Panero (Madrid, 1948- ). The discussion is divided into two main disquisitions. Deeply indebted to Roland Barthes' seminal distinction between lisible and scriptible texts, Chapters I to IV analyse how Panero has been partially constructed and interpreted as readerly oeuvre. Furthermore, they seek to challenge such construction. Chapters V to VII focus on the principal compositional techniques and structures that underlie the poet's work, in order to highlight their existence as writerly, malleable and multiple texts. After starting with the analysis of the ways in which Panero has been read by academic criticism and stating the problematic nature of reading the poet, the discussion moves on to disentangle some of the abundant mystifications and mythifications that surround the name of the author Leopoldo Maria Panero. This is carried out in examination of the public inscription of the poet's name as accursed writer. The analysis deploys Michel Foucault's genealogical technique. In so doing, the determining and contingent nature of the construction of the name Panero is revealed, as well as the possible effects on reading him as readerly text that this construction generates. Following this, the discussion moves on to examination of Panero's status as minoritarian. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's concept of minor literature, expression in his oeuvre is analysed as minoritarian writing machine, which may produce set of revolutionary effects. A final step in the first part of my argument analyses, in depth, one of Panero's short stories in order to establish the impossibility of reading of the poet as readerly in definitive manner. The second part of my dissertation—Chapters V-VII—focuses on analysis of Panero's key structural techniques. The blatantly and heavily intertextual practice in his oeuvre stands out among these techniques as its most remarkable feature, as evidenced, not only in the poet's original writings, strictu sensu, but also in his radical practice of translation, which he labels per-version. Regardless of the connotations these compositional techniques may have concerning interpretation and the analysis reveals important set of implications for intertextual practice regarding the central notions of authorship, readership, subjectivity and signification. Drawing on authors such as Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Jorge Luis Borges and Octavio Paz, among many others, this analysis concludes that Leopoldo Maria Panero constitutes formidable and relentless literary machine that systematically challenges the assumptions that underlie our basic understanding of the literary—and by extension, experience in general. In the absence of the possibility of an author, a subject and a meaning, writing voices its own undecidability, as malleable, virtual, vitalistic, unyielding and rhizomatic flow, open to be traversed by the tangential encounters with the reader.