Alejandro Herrero-Olaizola

Bio: Alejandro Herrero-Olaizola is an academic researcher. The author has contributed to research in topics: Latin Americans & Censorship. The author has an hindex of 2, co-authored 5 publications receiving 20 citations.

Publishing Matters: The Latin American "Boom" and the Rules of Censorship

Abstract: Alejandro HerreroOlaizola is Associate Professor of Spanish at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is the author o/*Nar rativas hibridas: parodia y posmodernismo en la fic tion contempor?nea de las Americas (Verbum, 2000), and editor of Fragmented Identities: Postmodern ism in Spain and Latin America (JILS, 1995). His most recent publications have appeared in Mosaic, Salina: Revista de Lletres, and MLN. His book The Censorship Files: Latin American Writers and Their Deals with Franco's Spain (forthcoming SUNY Press) examines censorship and the politics of publishing in 1960s and1970s Spain and Latin America. Shortly after the approval of the printing and publishing law of 1966, Manuel Fraga Iribarne, Spain's Minister of Information, reportedly commented: "He dado or den de que los lapices rojos los dejen en el fondo del cajon" (Cisquella 19).1 Fraga's pronouncement echoed not only the letter of the law?articles 1 and 50 allowed for freedom of

Writing lives, writing lies: The pursuit of apocryphal biographies

Abstract: Steven Millhauser's Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer, 1943-1954, by Jeffrey Cartwright, and Augusto Monterroso's Lo demas es silencio: La vida y la obra de Eduardo Torres underscore in a Borgesian fashion the fictionality and incompleteness of biographical discourse. In their works, parodic and apocryphal writings revise the relationship between the biographer and the biographee, and pose the question of whether it is really possible to write someone's life. ********** Why is it so fascinating to read about an invented writer and about his or her literary and/or academic production? What is entailed in the pursuit of creating fictional authors? To answer these questions I turn to the master of apocryphal writing, Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986), whose works often underscore the incompleteness inherent in writing someone's life. Particularly, his 1935 collection of "invented" historical characters, Historia universal de la infamia, and his short narratives, "Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote" and "Borges y yo," come to mind. Indeed, Borges's works and literary persona have permeated many efforts made among contemporary United States and Latin American writers to re-situate the role of the author as a fictional biographer of non-existent writers who claim to be real writers beyond the fictional realm. Apocryphal biographies, a genre that I see as clearly departing from Borges's works and literary persona, encompass the discursive implications of two commonly used terms: "fictional biographies" (which emphasize factual over fictional knowledge) and "biographical fictions" (which emphasize fictional over factual knowledge). In the case of Barges and other contemporary writers, such terms are problematic since, in their works, writing is often (if not always) an apocryphal exercise, an incomplete task based on "writings or statements of questionable authorship or authenticity" (see apocrypha, American Heritage Dictionary). In this essay, I privilege the term apocryphal biographies (rather than mock or fictional biographies), since apocryphal texts are not always considered completely false or lacking in truth. Rather, their existence often invites us to reconsider an established truth or even the authenticity of an original text. Indeed, this process of contrasting the original versus the apocryphal best ill ustrates the aesthetic program behind Borges's universal library--the network of fictional and verifiable authors, quotations, and texts that makes up his writings. Indeed, Steven Millhauser (1942- ) and Augusta Monterroso (1921- ) have revamped this aesthetic program into an academic exercise a la Borges by their relentless pursuit of apocryphal biographies in their writings, which I summarize in the title phrase of my essay as "writing lives, writing lies." Millhauser's fiction is strongly rooted in biographical writing and is suggestive of biographies or essays about real writers or artists. His 1972 novel, Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer, 1943-1954, by Jeffrey Cartwright, tells the story of a child genius writer, and his 1991 novella, Catalogue of the Exhibition: The Art of Edmund Moorash (1810-1846), portrays the life of nineteenth-century artist and Harvard undergraduate Edmund Moorash. Millhauser, a kind of postmodern biographer, seems preoccupied with telling real lives as opposed to fictional ones. He insists on the real nature of his protagonists as much as he suggests that he is both a novelist and a biographer. In this sense, his 1997 Pulitzer Prize-winner, Martin Dessler: The Tale of an American Dreamer, reconstructs the life of the entrepreneur following the pseudo-biographical model of his earlier works. Likewise, Monterroso's fictions privilege the figure of a writer who is fond of apocryphal and biographical writing. In Lo demas es silencio: La vida y la obra de Eduardo Torres, La oveja negra y obras completas y otras cuentos, and Movimiento perpetuo, Monterroso revises his role as a fabulist and features an eccentric revisionist writer who--like himself--parodies traditional tales. …

Allegory, blending, and censorship in modern literature

Abstract: I argue that politically subversive texts written in allegorical form attain their significance because they are conceptual blends. Political allegories allow writers to criticise regimes indirectly since writers can count on readers to mentally contruct appropriate blends. Readers are naturally driven to find new values that fit an allegory's fixed roles, often yielding new meaning for texts in different contexts. Unfortunately, politically subversive allegories may be censored when censors run the same blends. The three main texts discussed here ― Bulgakov's Heart of a Dog, Orwell's Animal Farm, and Miller's The Crucible ― are often interpreted as political allegories. I turn to conceptual blending theory to show in some detail how those readings arise. When it comes to allegory and censorship, I suggest that conceptual blending theory can offer us new insights into these timeless topics.

Translating Central American life writing for the Anglophone market : a socio-narrative study of women's agency and political radicalism in the original and translated works of Claribel Alegría, Gioconda Belli and Rigoberta Menchú

Abstract: At a time when scholars have rekindled the old debate about what is world literature and how can one study it (Casanova, 2004; Moretti, 2000, 2003; Damrosch, 2003, 2009), this thesis analyses the canonisation of Central American Revolutionary women�€™s writing as it moves toward the �€˜centre�€™ and becomes part of the world literary canon Drawing on a core-periphery systemic model, this thesis examines how translation for the Anglophone market involves the marginalisation at various levels of the narratives of political radicalism and the erotic that feature in the life writing works of Gioconda Belli, Claribel Alegria and Rigoberta Menchu The dataset chosen for this study consists of the Spanish originals and English translations of La mujer habitada (1988) and El pais bajo mi piel (2001) by Belli; No me agarran viva (1983) and Luisa en el pais de la realidad (1987) by Alegria, in collaboration with her husband Darwin J Flakoll; and Me llamo Rigoberta Menchu (1983) and Rigoberta: La nieta de los mayas (1998) by Menchu To develop this core-periphery systemic model, I have drawn on the work of scholars in the field of the sociology of translation such as Pascale Casanova (2004), Johan Heilbron (1999, 2010) and Gisele Sapiro (2008) In the context of the study, peripheralisation has been reconceptualised to assist in locating the texts included in the dataset within a hierarchical power structure (external level of peripheralisation); and identifying the shifts that arise during the translation and circulation of the ontological and public narratives underpinning such texts (internal level of peripheralisation) The study of the internal level of peripheralisation will draw on narrative theory, as elaborated by Margaret Somers and Gloria Gibson (1994), Somers (1997) and Mona Baker (2006) The choice of narrative theory employed in the thesis aims to foreground the impact that translation and the publishing field have on the selection and consecration of a literary genre; facilitate the comparison between the texts and paratexts of the originals and their English translations, and disclose the mechanisms through which the agency of the woman/author is neutralised, and the narratives of sexuality, body, political radicalism and feminine subjectivity are constructed in the original and reinterpreted through translation This comparative (para)textual analysis questions the nature of the process by which peripheral texts have accessed the Western canon In light of the findings, the thesis advocates the need to redefine the concept of canonisation in order to acknowledge a possible conflict between the new assumed centrality of the consecrated/translated text and the layers of peripheralisation that might still be constraining the original narratives Secondly, these findings draw attention to a gap in world literatures scholarship By assuming the autonomy of literature as an artistic form, world literature scholars might be in danger of obscuring the potential for manipulation inherent in translation practice, particularly in spaces favouring domesticating approaches to translation Thirdly, this work aims to serve as a reminder to scholars and activists not to overlook the impact of literary translation on the circulation of theories and narratives, particularly in the case of highly canonical texts such as that of Rigoberta Menchu (1984)

Hispanidad and the Hollywood ambassador: friendship, kinship and the rearticulation of Spanish national identity before the pact of Madrid

Abstract: This essay argues that the discourse of friendship in public diplomacy surrounding the figure of US Ambassador Stanton Griffis during his tenure in Spain in 1951–1952 circulated in the Spanish national imaginary to construct a more favorable popular image of the United States. Though the ideological positions guiding the Truman presidency and the Franco regime differed drastically, positive affect under the guise of friendship circulated via the media spectacle surrounding Griffis’s image – thus fostering a sense of Griffis as a friend not only to the regime but also to individual Spaniards. Using articles drawn from the Spanish press, as well as letters found in the Stanton Griffis Papers at the Truman Library Institute, I will show how objects of the specific Spanish national pride promoted by the Franco regime – such as Catholicism and anti-Communism, brotherhood and even bullfighting – “stuck” to Griffis’s image via the use of affectively “sticky” words, such as kindness and sympathy, shared v...

A Case of Exploding Markets: Latin American and South Asian Literary “Booms”

Abstract: This article seeks to explain the recent popularity of South Asian Anglophone literature (beginning in 1981 and peaking between 1998 and 2008) in light of the boom in Latin American literature of the 1960s. It argues that the phenomenon of regional literary “booms” shares features across both eras, and that a unified theory of booms is increasingly important to understanding the way contemporary literature circulates around the globe. Scholarship about both eras has tended to coalesce around three types of boom-driving agents: “creators,” “contexts,” and “curators.” Within that broader agreement, however, scholarship about the South Asian boom has tended to overemphasize the political symbolism of recent South Asian Anglophone literature and its global popularity, while under-emphasizing the political realities that create the conditions under which that literature became popular. This line of criticism has come at the expense of attention to literature’s other dimensions as a cultural object, as well as contextual explanations of popularity involving the role of governments, demographics, and market flows. The more diverse scholarship on the Latin American boom offers a corrective with insights for both the future of South Asian Anglophone literature and the field of World Literature.

Modernismo's Inverted Conquest and the Ruins of Imperial Nostalgia: Rethinking Transatlantic Relations in Contemporary Critical Discourse

Abstract: In his article on the figure of the indiano in Clarin and, more generally, nineteenth-century Spanish literature, James Fernandez called attention to the central place that Spanish America must have in discussions about Spanish national identity1: "The elaboration of a national identity is [...] one of the principal tasks modern Spanish writers and intellectuals have set for themselves, and any such elabora tion must inevitably come to terms with Spain's relationship to the New World" (32). Writing in 1996, Fernandez noted,