The disciplinary description in Martín Rivas and El ideal de un Calavera by Alberto Blest Gana

Abstract

The literary realism is a style of speech traceable through various formal features, all of them rhetorically organized to produce an effect of reading. Within the narrative nineteenth century, Chilean Alberto Blest Gana has a privileged site, and his work has reached enormous popularity over time. This article is a critical reading of two of his novels: Martin Rivas and El ideal de un Calavera, from a critical perspective attentive to the ideological configuration of the characters and reality, through descriptive discourse as an organizer of the world narrated. It is a link between these novels and realism as a manifestation of disciplinary ideology (Foucault, panopticism) and guilt as an induced meaning “subjects disciplined” (Starobinski).