| Abstract: | This article explores how certain presuppositions govern our interpretations of this canonical text by Octavio Paz. I trace its biographical and textual origins, the book's peculiar reception, some of its multiple intellectual sources, and the problem of genre and how these hermeneutic discourses and epistemological tools interact. Structure (the relationship between psychology and history), rhetorical strategies and central symbols and metaphors that give the book its unity and complexity are also discussed. I conclude that we can read this hybrid work simultaneously as essay, narrative text, autobiography and modern epic myth: it is both an analytic or ironic deconstruction and an imaginative, symbolic construction of individual and collective identity. |
