A partir de Walter Benjamin y, en particular, de su analisis y comprension de la modernidad a traves del Barroco, puede construirse una categoria etico-estetica, una poetica melancolica que sirva para indagar criticamente sobre determinadas obras y autores que ponen en valor una determinada funcion de la literatura y de las artes, una funcion social, antropologica, cultual; o, sise prefiere, una reivindicacion de la literatura y las artes como formas sociales, colectivas, de resistencia y preservacion. Para ello, las operaciones fundamentales de este trabajo son tres: se trata de extraer, desplegar y aplicar. En primer lugar, extraer. Extraer los contenidos basicos de esa poetica melancolica entre la amplia obra de Benjamin, sin violentarla, sin asumir completamente sus postulados, pero sin restarle coherencia. En segundo lugar, desplegar. Desplegar, en el sentido de comentar criticamente, ampliando ciertos elementos, relaciones e interpretaciones posibles. Pero no se trata, solamente, de definir los contenidos de una poetica, sino de constatar su utilidad y actualidad, es decir, en tercer lugar, aplicar. Aplicar esa poetica como instrumento de sentido o pauta de lectura...

Europa después de la lluvia: melancolía y resistencia en Max Aub, Giorgio Bassani y W.G. Sebald

"I sleep, but my heart wakes," says the Song of Songs. "The other night" names the sleepless night we spend in dreams. From The Interpretation of Dreams to Finnegans Wake, many of the great writing projects of the first half of the twentieth century articulate experiences of waking in the very depths of sleep, where no "I" can declare itself present though the heart still beats. After World War II, in the cold light of the closure of the age of dreambooks, Beckett and Blanchot discover with new clarity, and new fatigue, that what wakes when the "I" sleeps doesn't sleep when the "I" wakes. Revisiting Freud's argument that the dream is a form of writing, The Other Night looks at how life becomes literature in this wakefulness. Though we seem to be seeing things in our dreams, we are actually confronted with a kind of writing. This writing is not in our power, and yet it is ours. We are responsible for it in the same strange way that we are responsible for our lives.

The Other Night: Dreaming, Writing, and Restlessness in Twentieth-Century Literature

This thesis explores reactions of Chilean women’s poetry to neoliberalism in three chronological stages between 1980 and 2010. The first one focuses upon the years between 1980 and 1990 with the poems Bobby Sands desfallece en el muro (1983) by Carmen Berenguer and La bandera de Chile (1981) by Elvira Hernández, which are analysed in Chapters 2 and 3. These poems are reactions not only to the violence exerted during Pinochet’s regime (1973-1990), but also to the ideological purpose behind it: the overturning of the welfare state in favour of the privatisation of all public services. Both texts address these issues by developing themes of isolation and national identity. The second stage comprises the decade between 1990 and 2000. The poems selected to study this phase are Escrito en Braille (1999) by Alejandra Del Río and Uranio (1999) by Marina Arrate, which are developed in Chapters 4 and 5. Both texts express utter disillusion with their times. For these authors, the return of democracy after the 1988 plebiscite reveals that the country is not at ease with itself nor has it healed the wounds of its recent past. The poems enunciate an endless hopelessness based on the impossibility to overcome the commodification of daily life. Finally, the period between 2000 and 2010 shows the most explicit criticism of neoliberalism in the cohort, which also means that the economic model is fully functional. Both, Copyright (2003) by Nadia Prado and Bracea (2007) by Malú Urriola, studied in Chapters 6 and 7, are texts that express the discontents of living in a society ruled by neoliberalism, where those who see themselves as subjects and not consumers are in some ways alienated and deemed as freaks. This thesis proposes that women poets react to neoliberalism from a deep concern for Chilean society and its future.

Neoliberalism and its discontents : three decades of Chilean women's poetry (1980-2010)

This dissertation studies the dream narratives and accompanying interpolated semipicaresque stories of Antonio Enriquez Gomez in order to understand the satirizing aims of an exiled Spanish New Christian author. In El siglo pitagorico y vida de don Gregorio Guadana, La torre de Babilonia, and La inquisicion de Lucifer y visita de todos los diablos, Enriquez Gomez addresses corruption and deceit in the dominant ideology. Using allegorical settings whose satirical characteristics reflect the seventeenth century, Enriquez Gomez calls for the reform of greed, false appearances, and pride. The dissertation explores how, within the framework of Judeo-Christian teachings, the author challenges the social order of places such as a fictionalized Babylon and an infernal Inquisition that in varying degrees are metaphors for Spain. The dissertation also argues that the New Christian perspective of Enriquez Gomez’s works differentiates them from similar texts of his contemporary, Francisco de Quevedo, by substituting converso dissillusionment for the “stock” Golden Age type. This perspective is evident in Enriquez Gomez’s criticism of the Spanish Inquisition; in a definition of original sin that reflects a converso’s exile, longing, and rootlessness; and in the assertion of the superiority of virtuous deeds to ethnicity. Aided by theories of the moveable positionality of speakers and of the impermanence of human subjects, the

Longing for Justice: The New Christian Desengaño and Diaspora Identities of Antonio Enríquez Gómez

In recent years the two most important schools of literary criticism have moved in opposite directions, but converge in their neglect of the artist as creator and of the work of art as a unique creation. One school, embracing the Russian formalists, French structuralists, American New Critics, and now the Tel Quel group (Barthes, Derrida, Baudrillard), inhabits an increasingly complex and abstract world in which the critic is locked inside the text. The text appears as an autonomous, self-contained entity, isolated from its author, its social context, and its public' On the other hand, the sociological approach, focusing as it must on groups, assigns the author to a socioeconomic class, his work to a cultural group, and then attempts to discover the relationship between the two. Consequently, both schools have the effect of diminishing and ultimately eliminating the writer. These approaches have piqued the interest of critics of Golden Age drama. The generic name comedia, which tends to minimize differences, and the inordinate number and seeming homogeneity of the plays would appear to validate the search for universal structures. 2 Likewise the anonymity of many plays, confusion over authorship, frequency of collaboration, reworking of earlier plays, and, most important, the comedia' s mass appeal invite sociological analysis. The following pages explore the sociological approach as it concerns Lope de Vega.

Everett W. Hesse

Papers

La vida es sueno

La vida es sueno

Studies in Honor of William C. McCrary

The Comedia and Points of View

Calderón and Velázquez@@@Calderon and Velazquez