How to Verbalize Experience? Discomfort, Ambiguity, and Horizontality in Virginia Woolf's On Being Ill and Mercè Rodoreda's Mirall Trencat

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Petra Báder

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to offer a critical reading of Mercè Rodoreda’s Mirall trencat (1974) from On Being Ill, an insufficiently commented Virginia Woolf essay. Being aware of the influence of the English writer on the Catalan, we venture to rescue some basic ideas of Woolf to analyze motifs of discomfort, ambiguity, and horizontality in Rodoreda’s novel. Our intention is to demonstrate how Rodoreda takes advantage from the tension between the material and the immaterial (the physical and the non-physical, the tangible and the intangible), and from the one that is contoured between the vertical and the horizontal, in order to question the traditional notions of representation.

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How to Cite
Báder, P. (2021). How to Verbalize Experience? Discomfort, Ambiguity, and Horizontality in Virginia Woolf’s On Being Ill and Mercè Rodoreda’s Mirall Trencat. Acta Hispanica, (III), 121–132. https://doi.org/10.14232/actahisp.2021.0.121-132
Section
Articles
Author Biography

Petra Báder, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest

Petra Báder es profesora del Departamento de Estudios Hispánicos de la Universidad Eötvös Loránd de Budapest. Doctora por la misma universidad en 2018 con una tesis que estudia la fragmentación corpotextual en la narrativa de Salvador Elizondo y Mario Bellatin. Sus investigaciones se enfocan en la narrativa hispanoamericana postmoderna y contemporánea, en el tema de la representación del cuerpo en la literatura, pero también tiene trabajos publicados sobre metaficción y autoficción. Traductora de textos teóricos y críticos, coeditora, con Gabriella Menczel, de la versión húngara de Teorías hispanoamericanas de la literatura fantástica, compilada por José Miguel Sardiñas.

Received 2021-07-29
Accepted 2021-08-02
Published 2021-10-29

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