SOURCE: "The Dilemma of Disappearance and Literary Duplicity in José Donoso's Tres novelitas burguesas," Prismal Cabral, Vol. 3, Spring, 1979, pp. 29-46.

In the following essay, Magnarelli considers the stories in Tres novelitas burguesas both realistic socio-economic depictions of modern bourgeois society and self-referential works concerned with the natures of and relationships between truth, reality, art, and language.

"il me semble que c'est une pure question de mots . . ."

Literary theory of recent years has focused on the plurality of the literary text—that is, on the capacity of the signifier to evoke two or more different signifieds. In this manner, the literary work is acknowledged to carry a sociophilosophical message as well as a linguistic inquiry, as the text not only refers to the world which surrounds the writer and his interpretation of that world but simultaneously comments on its own existence and mode of being.

Perhaps there is no...