El presente estudio trata de armonizar diversas teorias aplicandolas al analisis del personaje. Partiendo de una base estructuralista, se considera al personaje--siguiendo a Claude Levi-Strauss--como una estructura ordenada en el axis vertical que forman los diversos niveles de suturas que entran en su construccion. El concepto de sutura, desarrollado por Jacques Lacan, se aplica a aquello que figura como lo que esta ausente, relacionando al sujeto con la cadena de su discurso. Esta sutura se da basicamente entre lo que denomino los dos constituyentes del personaje: personaje-en-la-historia y personaje-en-el-discurso, construye el personaje, el personaje-en-la-historia es aquello que, estando ausente, se hace presente por medio del personaje-en-el-discurso. Este, a su vez, y a pesar de ser lo que podriamos llamar el "generador" del personaje como tal y, por tanto, anterior en el tiempo, se presenta como posterior en el tiempo narrado quedando disuelto en un flujo de palabras. Los dos constituyentes basicos del personaje determinan y sirven para anudar los distintos niveles de suturas que se dan en su construccion: (a) a nivel espacio-temporal entre el personaje en un tiempo y un espacio que hipoteticamente anteceden a la historia narrada (personaje-en-la-historia), y su ilusoria existencia en el presente del discurso como flujo de palabras (personaje-en-el-discurso), (b) a nivel de discurso entre la descripcion del personaje y su construccion como tal, (c) a nivel de estructura entre el paradigma antropomorfo que informa al personaje y su disolucion en discurso y (d) a nivel constitutivo entre el personaje y el lector que lo construye. Siguiendo mas bien a Heidegger, se considera el personaje-en-el-discurso como algo que a la vez oculta y revela al personaje-en-la-historia, el cual aparece simultaneamente como ausente y como un ser-que-esta-ahi. El analisis de los distintos niveles a los cuales se dan las suturas de las que surge el personaje permite percibir los cambios que este ha sufrido dentro de la novelistica espanola contemporanea. Estos cambios trazan una trayectoria que va desde un intento, por parte del realismo, de re-crear algo muy cercano a una persona hasta una determinada intencion--dentro de nuestra actualidad posmoderna--de recrear al lector. Este, jugando con el texto, simultaneamente construye y destruye al personaje el cual se convierte asi en una imagen especular del mismo lector en su frustrada busqueda de una identidad que se le escapa.

The general purpose of this work is to demonstrate that deconstructive theory can explain the function of humor, or, conversely, that the process of humor can illustrate deconstructive theory. The points at which the two discourses converge or illuminate each other are highlighted, using as a literary focus a historic period in which literature explicitly designated as "humorous" flourished in Spain--specifically the 1920s and 1930s--and, more exactly, four authors identified with this movement--Ramon Gomez de la Serna, Wenceslao Fernandez Florez, Enrique Jardiel Poncela, and Julio Camba. These four authors pragmatically and theoretically sustain a concept of humor as a linguistic game that deconstructs our collective disease--the language through which we create our world and our being. Humor is principally a linguistic phenomenon that, in a peculiar manner, explains the process of signifying. Its fundamental resource is playing with words, making meaning indefinite, divided, and even impossible. As is true of all linguistic games, humor is intimately bound to the cultural context in which it manifests itself, and which, simultaneously, it helps to create. These, then, would be the two main divisions of the present analysis: (1) humor as seen from within itself--its structures and mechanisms; and (2) humor within its context, with which it maintains a constant exchange of mutual support and annihilation.

This dissertation examines the conflictive poetics of Federico Garcia Lorca’s drama Doña Rosita la soltera o El lenguaje de las flores. Poema granadino del novecientos, dividido en varios jardines, con escenas de canto y baile (Doña Rosita the Spinster or The Language of Flowers. A Poem of Turn-of-the-Century Granada, Divided into Various Gardens with Scenes of Song and Dance), which premiered in 1935, less than a year before his early death. The play brings into confrontation different, essential, even contradictory poetic and theatrical elements present in his work from his very first writings. Closely examining primary and secondary sources, including a variety of Lorca’s manuscript versions and the staging of Doña Rosita in Spain in 1935 and thereafter, my dissertation proposes a new approach to Lorca’s theater. Doña Rosita reveals one of the main characteristics of all of Lorca’s work: his innate tendency to deal with the unity of contraries. The complexity of Lorca’s play is revealed in comments by the playwright and by reviewers of its earliest performances. While some (Doménec Guansé, Andreu Artis, Antonio Espina) applauded Doña Rosita as a well-structured work that reflected Lorca’s maturity as a writer, others (for example, the literary critic Ignasi Agustí) panned the bewildering and “impossible” transition from Acts I and II, with their placid fin de siècle romance and their song, dance, and dialogue about the “Language of Flowers,” to Act III, which takes place in an empty, disturbing, and morgue-like space. What has been unnoticed in previous scholarship, is that Doña Rosita enacts the theatrical project and poetics that Lorca sketched out in El público (The Audience). Although most critics and, to some extent, Lorca himself, placed these plays in two different theatrical worlds, Doña Rosita and El público show that Lorca’s theater is not constrained by irreconcilable dualities but instead demonstrates a radical synthesis of contraries. My dissertation proposes a new theoretical framework: the “dialectics of abscission,” a metatheatrical approach based on dichotomies relevant to Lorca’s vision of theater. In conclusion, I show that Lorca’s play, one of his least studied, offers essential epistemological and aesthetic clues to a better understanding of his theater in general.

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