Orality as critique of history: reading the "Poema de Mío Cid"

Abstract

This study involves an inquiry into notions of reading, the relationship between orality and literacy, and theory of history, all with regard to Poema de Mío Cid criticism. It deals in particular with the responses to traditional criticism mounted by two important recent studies, those by María Eugenia Lacarra (1980) and Joseph Duggan (1989). Both studies question various of the basic lineaments of traditional criticism but at the same time, paradoxically, can be seen to reinscribe in different ways that criticism's central historico-referential gesture. The conclusion arrived at by means of examination of that phenomenon is that the PMC is in fact "narrated" by the literary-critical activity produced around it and that such narration is carried outthrough regress to certain dominant tendencies in modern historical narration. The study concludes with the proposed reading of a PMC fragment in which the text's resistance to interpretation by recourse to historical referentiality is demonstrated.