Abstract

This dissertation explores the notion of testimony as an act of poetry rather than simply of narrative, as it is more commonly treated. But poetry and narrative are examined together here, since poetry cannot be easily extricated from narrative. Most of the chapters look at specific moments of testimony in 20$\rm\sp{th}$-century Latin American literature. The problems of literatura testimonial are an underlying concern here, but the pages that follow, although always concerned with the testimony of specific and historical subjects, formulate a notion of testimony which responds more specifically to a certain conception of literature and irony in the writings of Friedrich Schlegel which continues to inform contemporary notions of democracy, the subject and the law: the possibility of the subject as something associated with a mixing of all genres, including philosophy. Most discussions of Schlegelian irony have assumed a link between the subject and narrative. By associating the subject with poetry, however, this study puts pressure on the Schlegelian model in order to speak of the subject as something with potentially more aggressive effects. The testimonies of poetry speak not before a law that is merely structured as a narrative, but before a law of narrative which is missing its poetry. Only a subject can respond to this law with a poem. ;The following chapters will be preoccupied with this notion of the law as such a missingness confronted by the possibility of poetic testimonies. The four chapters serve as four "legal" scenarios in which narrative and poetry confront each other with unexpected effects. The first chapter is a reading of Cervantes' Don Quijote through poems by Borges. Chapter two looks at an autobiographical novel by Silvia Molina in which the narrative story line makes an ironic appeal-response to the poetic epigraphs which stand outside it. Chapter 3 studies the interaction of poetry and narrative in the work of Xavier Villaurrutia. Chapter 4 reads two novels by Jose Lezama Lima through his poetry. Running through the study as a whole is a preoccupation with the ways in which poetic testimonial subjects reassert the law in a resistance to subordination by larger critical and historical narratives