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A Disconcerting Language: Valle-Inclán’s Tirano Banderas and the Hispanic Atlantic

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Imperialism and the Wider Atlantic

Part of the book series: The New Urban Atlantic ((NUA))

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Abstract

This article analyzes Ramón del Valle-Inclán’s Tirano Banderas (1926) as a novel embedded in the historical context of the Hispanic Atlantic, but one that constantly exceeds the cultural norms constituting the Atlantic as the inaugural space of the modern/colonial world. Drawing on Jacques Derrida’s thoughts on language, belonging, and cultural identity in Monolingualism of the Other, the article shows that the novel’s disconcerting language, which is made up of musical modernista literary language, of grotesque, socially marginal linguistic elements, and of strange idioms that are paradoxically unable to tie speakers to a territory or to a social situation, makes the reader aware of the alienation constitutive of all languages and thus displaces the idea of Spanish as an imperial/national language.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, CO, USA

    Javier Krauel

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  1. Javier Krauel
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Georgetown University, Washington, District of Columbia, USA

    Tania Gentic

  2. Georgetown University, Washington, District of Columbia, USA

    Francisco LaRubia-Prado

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Krauel, J. (2017). A Disconcerting Language: Valle-Inclán’s Tirano Banderas and the Hispanic Atlantic. In: Gentic, T., LaRubia-Prado, F. (eds) Imperialism and the Wider Atlantic. The New Urban Atlantic. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-58208-5_13

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