Realismo y utopía en El Éxodo de Yangana de Ángel Felicísimo Rojas

Abstract

Taking as a starting point the broad thematic spectrum that emerges from The Exodus of Yangana by Ángel Felicísimo Rojas, this doctoral thesis has as its fundamental purpose to listen to in the narrative plot the elements and strategies that, through social realism, numerous Latin American writers of The mid-20th century used to denounce, through the potential of literature, the world of injustices experienced by the exploitation of magnanimous landowners and increased industries in the nascent metropolises. From this framework, this thesis scrutinizes the thought of Felicísimo Rojas and its imprint on his literary work. My intention is to analyze how, from the author's perspective, the revolutionary utopia summons a prototype of a community in which the individual leads a fully human existence due to the work carried out and the eradication of social classes. Rojas's entelechy supposes a complicit and complementary dialogue between the social and collective organization of work and respect for intimate desires. Taking this statement as a basis, this work aims to unravel the author's social-liberal thinking and, at the same time, capture the parallels between Rojas' narrative argument and the rhetorical elements that adorn and enrich the motif of the biblical exodus. This research is descriptive and analytical in nature. In the first instance, it is based on the objective interpretation of the work that motivated the study and the problems that arise from it. Given the nature of the thesis, bibliographic-documentary segregation was used, through two sources of information: the primary, which includes publications, narrative, story and essay by the author; and the secondary one, made up of the works on which the liberal and social thought of Ángel Felicísimo Rojas is based and the academic production - monographs, articles or other types of material - that has served to deepen his narrative work. In the second instance, we have structured the study from an exegetical analysis through which the real and fictional events recreated in the work were verified, taking realism as a literary practice, the concept of utopia and the comparison between the two exoduses as a theoretical framework. This research identifies, therefore, realism and utopia as keys to reading The Exodus of Yangana by Ángel Felicísimo Rojas and proposes a new anthropological and humanistic vision from the analysis of the biblical Exodus as an intertextual antecedent of that of Yangana. The predominant method in the argumentation of the results is hermeneutical in nature, without ignoring other methods that, according to the analytical depth, were necessary. The nature of the work has required the consideration and use of both historiographic and literary methodological approaches, and the management of key concepts of literary theory such as intertextuality, based on the fundamental studies of Julia Kristeva and Gerard Genette. However, much of the weight of the analysis and interpretation rests on the deepening of the ideological footprint framed in liberal and socialist thought, on which Ángel Felicísimo Rojas built his thought, as well as in the utopian categories with which he faced the complaint. of injustice and social inequity. Finally, we believe that the analogies between the biblical Exodus and The Yangana Exodus have been fruitful insofar as they enrich and provide a greater dimension to the discursive statement.