Juan Ochoa: hacia una comprensión del relato breve
- Statement of Responsibility:
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Ezama Gil, María de los Angeles
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- Format:
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Journal article
- Language:
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Spanish; Castilian
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text (article)
- Published:
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Universidad de León: Servicio de Publicaciones 1988
- In:
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Estudios humanísticos. Filología ISSN 0213-1382 Nº 10, 1988, pags. 163-186
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- Annotation:
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Short fiction ¿one of the oldest literary forms¿ got finto its present shape during the 19th century, when the development of the genre was favoured by such a circumstance as newspapers boom. However, short story has been set aside by criticism because of some reasons as: need for a steady genre definition, confused terminology and too much diversity in methodology. This lack of critical interest becomes more noticeable since short story hasn't been considered other than partially and only through its most outstanding exponents (Alas, Pardo Bazán or Alarcón). Besides them �although in a lower level as most of all are second rate� we find an important group of writers who contributed significantly to the development of this genre. Juan Ochoa (1864-1899) is one of these very little known authors. Our approach to his short fiction works (three short novels and a dozen of short stories) intends to attain two purposes: first, to individualize short fiction as a genre; and second, to delimit �only in practice� the areas concerning particulaly short story and short novel. For the first object, we have used five structural principies (on the basis of Genette's 1972 book): time, mode, voice, characters and concurrences. Then, we get the second aim after the analysis of these principies which show us that short story and short novel are not two different genres, but two different ways of making the same suppositions. The final conclusion of our paper proves the scarce originality �specially concerning language� of a writer who very often followed foreign patterns. Nevertheless, we can point out that his best work was a short novel titled Un alma de Dios (1898), his most elaborated text whithout any doubt.