With close reference to relevant theoretical material, discuss the compatibility of Coelho’s Eleven Minutes with postmodernist constructions of identity.
Comparing Paulo Coelho’s writings to a delta of sediments is a just analogy to make in the scope of this essay: an accumulation of sediments from the bosom of everywhere; an everywhere nevertheless, seen through the eyes of the Brazilian, to paraphrase Ortolano (2003). The author’s tales are illustrative of phenomenon such as juxtaposition of radically exclusive identity elements of which an exemplar would be Maria’s family oriented farm-girl reverie pitted against the strong woman of adventure she symbolizes. Dash (2002) isolates processes of ‘metizaje, creolization and liminality’ in …show more content…
Ana Castillo, a Mexican-American Chicana writer uses a ‘fragmented epistolary style’ (Walter 1998) to foreground ‘Chicana’s search for identity in the borderlands … [characterized by] psychic restlessness’ (Walter 1998). The choice of this style by many authors allows for fragmented revelations of identity much in the style of monologues and stream-of-consciousness. This style is perfect for postmodern expression as a break into metanarrative connotes free choice and otherness or alterity. It is a voluntary renunciation of authority by the author as ‘free will is given to symbolic order as a solution to … identity crisis and search for selfhood’ (Walter 1998). The narrative becomes a terrain of insurrection for novel expressions of identities as the diary of Maria becomes an act of revision; a self-revision over what her selfhood had not been until then. She flourishes within this insurrection of her potential; potential symbolized in the image and constant reappearance of the library. There she discovers resources to forge herself in multiple states; with each book forging a new personality: the multifaceted woman (the temptress, the mother, and the teacher), the entrepreneur, the cultivated high cultured intellectual, the sexologist, the psychologist. Interestingly, this reminds us of Borges’ Library of Babel and his labyrinthine recit of identities. The scholar Anzaldua termed this state of being as the ‘coatticue state’, that is, a contradictory state of being after the Aztec snake goddess, the symbol of fused opposites. Again, the thematic of female divinity is encountered here. However, Coelho does not delimit Maria’s identity to binary representations and polarities. The novelist aims rather for a locus of disjoint
Comparing Paulo Coelho’s writings to a delta of sediments is a just analogy to make in the scope of this essay: an accumulation of sediments from the bosom of everywhere; an everywhere nevertheless, seen through the eyes of the Brazilian, to paraphrase Ortolano (2003). The author’s tales are illustrative of phenomenon such as juxtaposition of radically exclusive identity elements of which an exemplar would be Maria’s family oriented farm-girl reverie pitted against the strong woman of adventure she symbolizes. Dash (2002) isolates processes of ‘metizaje, creolization and liminality’ in …show more content…
Ana Castillo, a Mexican-American Chicana writer uses a ‘fragmented epistolary style’ (Walter 1998) to foreground ‘Chicana’s search for identity in the borderlands … [characterized by] psychic restlessness’ (Walter 1998). The choice of this style by many authors allows for fragmented revelations of identity much in the style of monologues and stream-of-consciousness. This style is perfect for postmodern expression as a break into metanarrative connotes free choice and otherness or alterity. It is a voluntary renunciation of authority by the author as ‘free will is given to symbolic order as a solution to … identity crisis and search for selfhood’ (Walter 1998). The narrative becomes a terrain of insurrection for novel expressions of identities as the diary of Maria becomes an act of revision; a self-revision over what her selfhood had not been until then. She flourishes within this insurrection of her potential; potential symbolized in the image and constant reappearance of the library. There she discovers resources to forge herself in multiple states; with each book forging a new personality: the multifaceted woman (the temptress, the mother, and the teacher), the entrepreneur, the cultivated high cultured intellectual, the sexologist, the psychologist. Interestingly, this reminds us of Borges’ Library of Babel and his labyrinthine recit of identities. The scholar Anzaldua termed this state of being as the ‘coatticue state’, that is, a contradictory state of being after the Aztec snake goddess, the symbol of fused opposites. Again, the thematic of female divinity is encountered here. However, Coelho does not delimit Maria’s identity to binary representations and polarities. The novelist aims rather for a locus of disjoint