Guided interpretations and the importance of signs: Text, reader, and author in Carlos Fuentes and Jorge Luis Borges

The purpose of the following thesis is to apply Umberto Eco's concepts included in his essay Intentio Lectoris, the Peircean notions of the relationship between the object, the sign, and the interpretant, and other essays that deal with the relationship between the reader, the text, and the author to two Latin American works of literature: one Mexican, Carlos Fuentes's "Chac Mool" and one Argentinean, Jorge Luis Borges's "Las ruinas circulares." The objective is to discuss the structural devices that guide the reader through particular interpretations, analyze the sociohistorical agents that influence the author as well as the reader, and pinpoint the difference between two possible types of interpretation, political and symbolic, based on two concepts pertaining respectively to "Chac Mool" and "Las ruinas circulares:" the statue of Chac Mool as the symbol of the Pre-Colombian traditional values and the dream as a symbol of the process of writing.