SOURCE: “Language and Referentiality in Señas de identidad,” in Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispáicos, Vol. XI, No. 3, Spring, 1987, pp. 611-21.

In the following essay, Herzberger analyzes how language functions in Goytisolo's Señas de identidad. He argues that “Goytisolo's literary language is not ‘new,’ as many have contended, only the contexts into which it is placed and the dynamic bi-polar movement that results.”

Juan Goytisolo's fiction of the past decade and a half, as Goytisolo himself has often reminded us, is shaped to a large degree by his readings of the Russian Formalists and the Prague School and French Structuralists.¹ During this period Goytisolo's theoretical essays and metafictional ponderings on the nature of his narrative are informed by some of the most important principles of Formalist theory: emphasis on the linguistic material, on the “literariness” of verbal art; on intertextuality and the evolution of literature as...