Showing papers in "Hispania in 1964"

The Significance of the Name ‘Almudena’ in Galdós’ Misericordia

Abstract: by the fine studies of Robert Ricard, "Sur le personnage d'Almudena dans Misericordia," and Dinah Lida, "De Almudena y su lenguaje."' However, to date, no scholar has investigated and commented on the character's name. This seems imperative for a full understanding of the personaje because it has been repeatedly demonstrated that the names Gald6s gave to his principal characters were not incidental tags, but carefully chosen appellations designed to reflect essential attributes of the character and frequently to carry additional symbolic connotations as well.2 On the surface, the name Almudena serves as a convincing bit of realism-i.e., the reader has every right to expect that a Moroccan character who comes from "Sus, tres dias mis alli de Marrakesh" (p. 1882),3 "pueblo de Ullah de Bergel" (p. 1912), should have an Arabic-sounding name. However, with customary Galdosian irony, the word, when investigated, turns out to be more Spanish than Arabic and is, in its present form, completely Madrilenian. It is so Madrilenian in fact that Gald6s felt no need to explain it to his reader. Since 1085, citizens of Madrid have honored the Virgin as their patroness under the name Nuestra Seiiora de la Almudena (the latter word being derived from Almudit or granary as will be explained later) .4 The one of Misericordia is, in many parts and i many ways, very humorous; and Al udena is, among other things, a very comical character. During the latter half of the nineteenth century, it was customa y to poke fun at such Moroccan types living in the Spanish capital. An example of this may be seen in the caption accompanying a sketch in the magazine El museo universal showing "El vendedor de daitiles, tipo casi espafiol muy conocido en Madrid."' One of Gald6s' characters

Changing View of the Indian in Mexican Literature

Abstract: The contrast between these two novels is interesting and illuminating because superficially they have much in common: the Chiapas locale; a view of the exploitation suffered by the Tzotzil Indians; the twentieth century setting in time; an implicit criticism of the Mexican Revolution; and finally, violent rebellion of the Indians. Both authors have received considerable international attention, with at least one work by each published in German, French, and English. While Traven, the older of the two, is not a Mexican national (his real identity and nationality are a continuing subject of conjecture), his novel is Mexican in the sense of the author's clearly first-hand experiences in the country, the authentic setting and plot, his influence and interrelationship with Mexican literature, and the wide circulation he has enjoyed in Mexico. The novel under discussion has undergone five Mexican editions, and was presented theatrically in Mexico City.

The Poem Itself

Abstract: Available again for a new generation, this classic work contains over 150 of the greatest modern French, Spanish, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Russian poems presented in the original languages and brilliantly illuminated by English commentaries.

Lunfardo, Argentina's Unknown Tongue

Abstract: With the passage of time, however, Lunfardo has emerged from the waterfront to permeate the everyday speech of higher strata of Buenos Aires society. Although its inelegance is undisputed and purists rail against it, it has come to be employed to some extent by all porteiios, if only humorously, and has developed a fairly extensive literature of its own. Moreover, as the language of the ever-popular tango, Lunfardo has spread from its native Puerto to other parts of the Argentine and even beyond her borders.

Notes on "Braz Cubas"

Abstract: Memdrias pdsthumas de Braz Cubasl was first published in 1880 when Machado de Assis was forty-one, nearly twenty years before Domr Casmurro. At first sight the two novels are similar; each is told in first person narrative by a wealthy old man whose long life has been dedicated to himself; each reveals by ironic indirection the narrator's selfish and cynical nature, aggravated by his indolent existence. One of the chief differences, however, and herein lies the superiority as a novel of Dom Casmurro over the other, is that Casmurro begins life with some chances of being human, since the purpose of the novel is to show the tragedy of his decadence; whereas it is evident that Braz Cubas has

Lo Religioso y lo Fantastico en el "Poema de Mio Cid"

Abstract: El rasgo caracteristico del Poema de Mio Cid es la adhesi6n del juglar a la historicidad de los hechos. En los pocos casos en que parece alejarse de la verdad rigurosamente hist6rica, nunca se deja arrastrar por la imaginaci6n hasta el punto de crear elementos del todo fantAsticos o de presentar los acontecimientos bajo una luz irreal o hiperb6lica: a lo sumo, se limita a afiadir unas pocas situaciones que pueden ficilmente pasar por reales. Indudablemente habri mis de una raz6n por explicar la falta de lo imaginario que diferencia la epopeya espafiola de las otras 6picas populares: en este escrito se tratara de destacar si la mayor o menor intensidad del elemento religioso haya podido ser una de las principales razones por las que son tan pocos y tan d6biles los elementos fantisticos del poema cidiano. En breve, pueden asi resumirse los pocos que aparecen en el Poema de Mio Gid:

The Preparation of College Teachers of Modern Foreign Languages

Abstract: N DECEMBER 1951, the Modern Language Association reasserted its original policy of including among its official concerns pedagogical matters involving modern languages, matters that it had ignored since the 1920's. The MLA took this step not because its members had grown less devoted to scholarship but because they were reminded of a nearly forgotten truth: a widespread neglect of language will erode, and eventually destroy, the foundation on which literary scholarship must build. That the neglect existed was known by many, including college admission officers, the Foreign Service, even graduate departments of Arts and Sciences that saw its effects in the shrinking language competence of their entering students. What no one knew was its extent. Since effective action can not be taken without an accurate assessment of the situation, the Foreign Language Program was launched in 1952, with support from the Rockefeller Foundation, to gather facts and figures and to determine the role that language learning should play in American life. As it ended its first decade, the Foreign Language Program could look back with some gratification on what had been accomplished. Its fact finding had made possible that influential document, William Riley Parker's The National Interest and Foreign Languages, now in its third edition. The Program had contributed significantly to the shaping and passage of the National Defense Education Act of 1958. It had developed new teaching materials on the elementary school and college levels. It had defined the proficiencies to be expected of modern-foreign-language teachers and devised means of testing them. Most of its noteworthy accomplishments in that decade were in the elementary and secondary schools. It was not that college and university problems had been neglected; an impressive beginning had been made by Modern Spanish. In general, however, it had seemed that higher education would best be served by paying concentrated attention first to the broad base on which our whole educational structure rests. During those ten hard-working years most problems of foreign languages in the schools had been attacked if not solved. Among the high-level issues remaining, perhaps the most important, surely the most sensitive, was better teacher preparation. This, then, was among the FL Program's chief preoccupations as it entered its second decade. And indeed the nature and magnitude of the problem were such as to constitute virtually a second phase of the Program. The complex interrelationships were at once apparent. It is in liberal-arts colleges rather than in teachers' colleges that the largest number of high-school teachers of foreign language receive their training. These teachers, in turn, determine the attitudes and skills that students bring to college and by which their achievement in this field is largely governed. The degree of success and achievement in college foreign-language teaching affects the number of graduates who will return to the high schools to teach. It also affects the number who will go on in:to graduate school to work toward the master's and doctor's degrees and thus replenish the supply of teachers and scholars in colleges and universities. And what happens to these last in graduate school will in turn exert a powerful influence on undergraduate instruction, where the whole process seems to have its roots. It has seemed clear, therefore, that improvement of teacher preparation must focus initially on the graduate school, the institution responsible for shaping not only teachers but teachers of teachers. In order to learn what graduate departments are doing specifically about teacher training, the MLA, with support from the Carnegie Corporation, devised a questionnaire and sent it to all the graduate schools that grant the Ph.D. in any modern foreign language. There

The Mexican Revolution as Reflected in the Novel

Abstract: by human emotions, influenced by limited experience and by basic assumptions, historians face an almost unsurmountable task in reviving the past in order to see it in perspective. One of the most contro versial periods in the civilization of Mexico was the Revolution beginning in 1910. There were few who recorded the swift and complex course of events and much of the available material is polemic in character. Historians of the time were