Identity, Alterity and Transition in The Court of Fools by Rosa Beltrán. Fiction and Textual Reality

Abstract

This essay on the Mexican novel, La corte de los ilusos (The court of fools) by Rosa Beltrán, is divided into three parts: I. Myth, alterity and equality, II. Paratext, being and identity, and III. Iturbide: Transition and alterity. Discourses, social practices and ideological manifestations reveal a particular novelistic repre- sentation. Socio-critical analysis has profound implications. The narrative displays the constitution of a series of participant characters of a political elite and their later decline. The essay proposes an approach to the identity and alterity of the protagonists, situated in a moment of historical-fictional transition, which reveals the novel's system of representation. Textual manifestations of identity and its problematization, alterity, the programatic presence of paratext, intertextuality of myth and its symbolic use, as well as the representation of hierarchy, constitute the organizing textual nucleus.