Emron Esplin

Bio: Emron Esplin is an academic researcher from Brigham Young University. The author has contributed to research in topics: Literary magazine & Literary criticism. The author has an hindex of 2, co-authored 6 publications receiving 50 citations.

The Mexican Revolution in the Eyes of Katherine Anne Porter and Nellie Campobello

Abstract: T literature of the u.s. south has found new life in the burgeoning field of inter-American literary studies.1 Both the U.S. South’s literatures and its histories have played key roles in the academic attempt to connect the literatures and histories of the United States to those of Latin America and the Caribbean from the groundbreaking work of Bell Gale Chevigny and Gari Laguardia’s 1986 collection, Reinventing the Americas: Comparative Studies of Literature of the United States and Spanish America, through Gustavo Pérez Firmat’s “invitation or come-on” (5) to study American literatures side by side in his 1990 edited volume, Do the Americas Have a Common Literature? to Caroline F. Levander and Robert S. Levine's recent collection, Hemispheric American Studies. The U.S. South aptly serves as the metaphorical bridge between the northern and southern halves of the American hemisphere because, as Deborah Cohn and Jon Smith argue in their introduction to Look Away!: The U.S. South in New World Studies, “the U.S. South comes to occupy a space unique within modernity: a space simultaneously (or alternately) center and margin, victor and defeated, empire and colony, essentialist and hybrid, northern and southern (both in the global sense)” (9). With the importance of the U.S. South in this inter-American conversation, it is surprising that very few scholars examine the work of Katherine Anne Porter from a hemispheric approach, especially considering Porter’s involvement in Mexican art and politics in the early 1920s and again in the early 1930s.2 Thomas F. Walsh’s Katherine Anne

Cosmopolitan Poe: An Introduction

Abstract: The work and life of Edgar Allan Poe maintain an international presence shared by few if any of his compatriots. Consider the near worldwide commemoration of Poe's recent bicentennial in 2009. Tousands of scholars, readers, and Poe aficionados celebrated Poe's birth across Europe, Asia, and the Americas throughout the entire year in a convincing tribute to Poe's continued popular and literary potency, his cosmopolitan presence, and the increasingly global nature of his appeal and influence. Analyzing Poe's international connections is certainly nothing new, but as Lois Davis Vines suggests in her introduction to Poe Abroad: Influence, Reputation, Affinities, any study of Poe's influence abroad begs another study (4). With this cluster of papers originally presented in a seminar entitled "Cosmopolitan Poe" at the 2010 meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association, we seek to expand the international dialogue surrounding Poe and his work that has been growing since the 1840s. The seminar included presentations that placed Poe's works in conversation with authors from China, the Caribbean, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, and Italy and papers that read Poe alongside (or, as a part of) the African-American trickster tradition, the genre of nautical biographies, and post-structuralist philosophy. The cluster contains four of these papers--Jenny Webb's comparative analysis of Poe alongside Italian author Italo Calvino, Renata Philippov's reading of Poe and Brazil's Machado de Assis, Genevieve Amaral's analysis of the monstrosity of "foreign" texts in Poe's "The Man of the Crowd," and Caroline Egan's examination of Horacio Quiroga's re-writings of Poe's "The Cask of Amontillado." As a whole, these essays place Poe in a global context that emphasizes the mutual influence of Poe on the world and the world on the current image of Poe. This continued influence underscores the growing cosmopolitan nature of Poe's legacy; the literary and theoretical junctures between Poe and the various authors, themes, and genres presented here highlight the ease with which Poe moves through an international audience, an audience that continually finds itself in the familiarity of Poe's writings. Poe first appeared "outside the English-speaking world" in "an imitation of his 'William Wilson' that appeared in La Quotidienne in December 1844," and several of Poe's works were translated into French while Poe was still alive (Vines, "Poe in France" 9). The French not only hold the credit for being the first "foreign" stop on the subsequent world tour of Poe's writings, but also serve as a primary catalyst for Poe's long-term success as a world writer. (2) In his well-known treatise on Poe's relationship with France--The French Face of Edgar Poe--Patrick F. Quinn juxtaposes Poe's reception in France with the cold treatment Poe's work received in the United States during the first century after his death in 1849: "our critics, far from pushing Poe onto the stage of world literature, have rather insisted that his name be retained exclusively as a minor one even in the cast of American letters. [...] His American contemporaries were reluctant to pay him merely conventional homage; for his French admirers the problem was to find a language of praise sufficiently sublime" (11-12). As Quinn, Vines, and countless others note, the translations of and general advocacy for Poe by French poet Charles Baudelaire and the continued importance of Poe in the work of the French Symbolists forever launched Poe into the global literary marketplace. At least some of Poe's global success must be attributed to his foreign advocates rather than to Poe's work itself. Peruvian novelist, politician and recent Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa called Poe, regardless of the difficulties he faced in life, a lucky writer: "Aunque su vida estuvo marcada por la desgracia, Edgar Allan Poe fue uno de los mas afortunados escritores modernos en lo que concierne a la irradiacion de su obra por el mundo" [Even though his life was marked by misfortune, Edgar Allan Poe was one of the most fortunate modern writers in what concerns the radiation of his work throughout the world] because two talented translators (also famous authors in their own right) spread Poe's fiction abroad in both French and Spanish--Baudelaire in the nineteenth century and Julio Cortazar in the twentieth (19). …

Excerpt from Borges’s Poe: The Influence and Reinvention of Edgar Allan Poe in Spanish America

Abstract: Author(s): Esplin, Emron | Abstract: Excerpt from Borges’s Poe: The Influence and Reinvention of Edgar Allan Poe in Spanish America (University of Georgia Press, 2016)

Jorge Luis Borges's References to Edgar Allan Poe: An Annotated Bibliography, Section 3

Abstract: Throughout his distinguished career, Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges maintained a complex, reciprocal literary relationship with Edgar Allan Poe. Borges referred to Poe in numerous articles, prologues, stories, poems, lectures, dialogues, and interviews he wrote or participated in between the early 1920s and the mid-1980s. These items range from a limited number of articles and interviews focused specifically on Poe to brief nods to Poe’s works in pieces dedicated to other authors. As part of a three-stage effort to offer future scholars a substantial guide to documents demonstrating Borges’s long-term engagement with the US author and his works, “Jorge Luis Borges’s References to Edgar Allan Poe: An Annotated Bibliography, Section 3” directs readers to the notes Borges kept in his copies of books by and about Poe that are held in his personal libraries at the Fundacion Internacional Jorge Luis Borges and at the Sala del Tesoro in the Biblioteca Nacional Argentina, both in Buenos Aires.

History and Memory in the Two Souths: Recent Southern and Spanish American Fiction

Abstract: Deborah Cohn's book outlines a new geography in Inter-American literature, one which transcends linguistic boundaries between the English and Spanish languages to link the modern literature of the South of the United States with the writers of the Latin-American contemporary renaissance. The unwitting conquistador of this new territory, Cohn claims, was William Faulkner. To major Hispanic American writers he introduced a South that shared with Latin America a plantation system whose decline led to rural backwardness; a condition that brought about a sense of defeat and dispossession and a trail of political and cultural strife. Cohn, who teaches Hispanic studies at McGill University, begins her study by discussing Faulkner's legacy to the new, post-WWII narrative in Latin America. But beyond Faulkner her aim is to "examine convergences, similar features and strategies that have developed as responses to analogous social and political circumstances" in writers from both language communities. In the middle-twentieth-century South, as in Hispanic America one generation later, literature has retained its importance in contributing to the construction of national identity. By comparing AngloAmerican and Spanish-American novelists, Cohn defines the features of Southern strategies of literature: the redefinition of history, the role and stylistic treatment of memory, the attitude to realism and magic realism. She also identifies a set of common subjects of interest-political and social unrest, the double consciousness of belonging in a dominant tradition as well as one's own culture, the foregrounding of the process of telling through dialogue. Like Faulkner, a modernist, but also a regionalist who reached universal status, the authors Cohn studies find ways to replace chronological order with alternative modes of representing time. The core of Cohn's book is a careful and provocative comparison of three pairs of classic books: Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! and Mario Vargas Llosa's Real Life of Alejandro Mayta; Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man and Isabel Allende's House of the Spirits; Katherine Ann Porter's Miranda stories and Juan Rulfo's Pedro Paramo. In Faulkner and Vargas Llosa, Cohn explores "a curious dialectic between the concealment of information and the imaginative creation of "facts" to compensate for a gap in verifiable knowledge." The narrative strategies of both authors in Absalom, Absalom!-- with its connection to the Caribbean South-and The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta are thoughtfully analyzed, their effects compared and contrasted, with complementary comments on other works by these authors, to show how both novelists reterritorialize historiography and story-telling through the foregrounding of the act of enunciation. In both examples, Cohn explains, the frame narratives question the relevance of historical narrative, though not its exemplary value. …

Transnational American Studies’ Female Trouble

Abstract: Google has been in the news lately for its efforts to address unconscious bias in its ranks. Eager to increase the gender diversity of its workforce—in 2014, women accounted for just 30% of the company’s employees—Google is at the vanguard of Silicon Valley’s “bias-busting” efforts. In a New York Times article discussing the company’s workshops educating its personnel about unconscious biases, Google’s Senior Vice President of People Operations, Laszlo Bock, describes employees’ ballooning awareness of gender bias: “Suddenly you go from being completely oblivious to going, ‘Oh my god, it’s everywhere’” (qtd. in Manjoo). Scholars heralding technology as the next pivot of the transnational turn link our work to Silicon Valley’s battle against sexism. In a recent review of anthologies showcasing transnational approaches to American Studies, Caroline Levander identifies “technological modes of scholarly analysis and dissemination” as the cutting edge of American Studies teaching and research (560). She pays particular attention to essays that forecast digital domains as emerging hotbeds of transnational work, including one asserting that “the success of scholarly and curricular efforts to transnationalize American studies largely hinges on our ability to recognize digital environments as generative sites for social interaction and cultural critique” (Oppermann 305). Digital environments unquestionably engender social interactions. If these settings represent the next frontier of American literary studies, though, we would do well to account for how gender impacts online experience. In her blog for the Times Literary Supplement, Cambridge classicist Mary Beard details the “truly gobsmacking” misogyny she has been subjected to by “internet troll[s].” In Hate Crimes in Cyberspace (2014), legal scholar Danielle Citron argues that online harassment is so pervasive and injurious that “the next stage of the women’s rights movement should be focused on achieving equality in digital networks” (100). Given that women’s online interactions can take shape both as the multidirectional flows that interest transnationalists and as one-way flows of misogyny, our technotransnationalism needs to account for how digital environments generate different kinds of experiences for different users.

Boom,Realismo Mágico– Boom andBoomito

Abstract: Poetry was part of the common sound space, ranging from grand odes to heroes to popular songs about bandits or gauchos. The recitation of a poem, often composed solely for the occasion, accompanied most public events, and later in the century learning to recite poetry well was considered part of a good education. Poems from the ancient Spanish romancero were alive and well then in Spanish America, as Portuguese traditional poetry was in Brazil. Gertrudis Gomez de Avellaneda is the brightest star in the nineteenth century's female poetic firmament and, until the appearance of Ruben Dario in the 1880s, is perhaps only rivaled in the lyric by her earlier compatriot, Jose Maria de Heredia. With the expansion of public education, especially the normalista movement in Argentina, Mexico, Chile, and other countries, young people, both men and women, from modest beginnings entered the literary sphere.