Titles
- La cena de los notables. Sobre lectura y crtítica
La cena de los notables. Sobre lectura y crtítica (Dinner of the distinguished. On literature and criticism), essay
This essay results from years of literary activity on the part of its author, Constantino Bértolo, one of Spain’s most prestigious critics and editors. It is also the product of a reflection on some elements crucial to this activity: writing, reading, and criticism.
La cena de los notables attempts to articulate the meaning of literature based on one central idea: literature as violence—you listen, I talk—which requires a constituent pact between the writer and the reader: one demands to be heard and one accepts the silence reading implies. Thus, Literature is defined as the place where two responsibilities meet to use collective words, that of writers and that of readers. They confront one another and respond to one another.
Starting from an elucidation of this pact and by analyzing and commenting on works such as Martin Eden by Jack London, Madame Bovary by Gustave de Flaubert, Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson, and The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy, the essay offers us a unique line of argumentation about reading and its mechanisms, about the act of writing and its temptations and about literary criticism and its limits.
Spain: Editorial Periférica, 2008; Brazil: Livros da Matriz; Serbia: Glasnik
