QUESTIONS on El AMOR ES UN JUEGO SOLITARIO :

 

Please see also an on-line bibliography for Tusquets, and some outline lecture notes (for a Part II lecture on Tusquets).

 

Some of these questions (taken or adapted from critical works on Tusquets) are worded in a way which you would be unlikely to find in a Part I essay question. However, it is well worth you thinking about the text in these terms – but don’t panic if you find some of them difficult to follow.

 

(1)        "In El amor es un juego solitario, even the most intimate desires conform to social and literary stereotype." Discuss.

(2)        "The title of El amor es un juego solitario could equally well have been El amor es un juego literario." Discuss.

(3)        "In Tusquets’ novels, the characters do nothing but read and reread their own narratives." Discuss with reference to El amor es un juego solitario.

(4)        "The story of the lives of the three protagonists becomes the story of the telling of the story. Each is shaped by prior readings which are rehearsed and reworked in the production of personal or coauthored scripts." Discuss with reference to El amor es un juego solitario.

(5)        "The syntactic complications, verbal complexity and density of style in Tusquets’ narrative are aimed at subverting masculine narratives of closure and climax, converting them into a feminine discourse of infinite textual ‘foreplay’." Discuss with reference to El amor es un juego solitario.

(6)        "El amor... should be read as a critique of language and (male) culture." Discuss.

(7)        "Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of El amor... is that Ricardo’s ‘scripting’  of the love narrative extends to lesbian relations also." Discuss.

(8)        "By repeating the figures of male language, miming the gestures of male culture, Tusquets treads a tricky and dangerous path to new forms of female agency." Discuss.