La poética narrativa de «El Caballero Carmelo»

This paper proves that, thanks to its narrative poetics, the short story El Caballero Carmelo (1913) [The Carmel Knight]-a classic short story in Latin America- continues to surprise for its freshness and representativeness. Freshness is the result of the meaning effects of a narrative intended to satisfy universal reader expectations. Representativeness is achieved with content strategically targeted to a specific reader. A narratological model and a model based on information from the sociocultural context were applied for the methodology. It is concluded that the story employs narrative procedures and themes of great world literature blended with resources oriented to the immediate social reader. This results in a Peruvian national that abandons modernist aesthetics and privileges regional referents, lexicon, syntax, symbols and values.