Showing papers in "Hispanic Review in 1984"

Variable concord and sentential plural marking in Puerto Rican Spanish

Abstract: ECENT analyses of syllable-final segments which form the inflectional system in Puerto Rican Spanish have indicated that their variable deletion may be differentially constrained by phonological, structural and informational factors.' In the case of the nominal plural marker (s), i t was found tha t although its deletion from determiners, nouns, and adjectives in the noun phrase did not occur if i t threatened to make the sentence ambiguous, this possibility rarely occurred because of many types of contextual disambiguation. The main constraints on (s) deletion were phonological and syntactic. The syntactic constraint was a quantitative tendency towards local concord: noun phrases tended to retain a marker on all their components, or more frequently, on none of them. The verbal plural marker (n) was found to be relatively rarely deleted, and its deletion was more strongly constrained by functional (i.e. informational) factors. These variables have traditionally been studied in isolation, although there is some indication tha t their behavior is interdependent according to functional criteria: analysis of individual

Carpentier and Jolivet: magic music in "Los pasos perdidos"

Abstract: ALEJO Carpentier's preoccupation with music is well-known and well-documented in his own work as well as in criticism about him. Three volumes of his music criticism, aptly titled Ese misico que Ulevo dentro, and the prominence of music as a narrative theme and structural device in works such as "El acoso," Concierto barroco, La consagraci6n de la primavera and Los pasos perdidos attest to this lifelong enthusiasm.' A parallel may be drawn between Carpentier's musical interests and his search for a new narrative form appropriate to his depictions of the New World and to the recurring theme of a return to the source. This quest for primitive purity lies at the structural core of Los pasos perdidos, the narrator of which is a composer whose travels into the jungle take him backward in time, allowing him to discover what he believes to be the beginnings of music, and inspiring him to return to his artistic vocation. Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria in The Pilgrim at Home (Ithaca, 1977) has demonstrated in detail the eclectic nature of Carpentier's literary style. In Los pasos perdidos, the novelist draws on early chronicles and the accounts of nineteenth-century explorers, as well as his own travels, in order to transform what began as simple reportage into a work of fiction. His use of music is also eclectic, drawing on specific sources for the musical substance of his narrator's fictional world. For example, in his "Nota" Carpentier gives us a source of the shaman's dirge in Episode xxiii, a recording

Clothing in "Triant-lo-Blanc": evidence of "Realismo vitalista" or of a New Unreality

Abstract: DhAMASO Alonso has stated very emphatically that nowhere in medieval literature do we find the realism of Tirant, equating what he calls its "realismo libre y vitalista" with the accounts of the brutality of war and of the jousts, and even more with its bawdiness, its frank speech, and the portrayal of flawed character in the royal court of Constantinople.1 In fact, he calls particular attention to the many references to undergarments as a sign of this realism.2 I propose that the author of Tirant was not so much creating a picture of the real world as he was creating a new, different unreal world in order to achieve a specific literary end in this unusual novel. Mario Vargas Llosa offers an especially apt twentieth-century model when he compares Martorell's effort to create a total reality to the desire of a character in a Borges short story to create "un mapamundi de tamai'o natural."3 That is to say that the author was trying to create an accurate, functioning, imaginary universe (worldly in character), comparable in completeness to the remarkably detailed and functionally correct otherworldly universe of Dante in the Divine Comedy. I do not mean

Music in "La Diana" of Jorge de Montemayor

Abstract: W HILE buttressing their fondness for music with the authority of the ancients, Renaissance humanists explored new ways of elevating and exalting the word with the sound of music. With the sixteenth century, Spain, in particular, enters into its Golden Age of music and musical instruments, which declines in the following century as painting takes up the scepter of the arts. The Renaissance experiences the most glorious stages of Spanish music with such figures as Francisco Salinas, Antonio de Cabez6n, and the great polyphonists of the Sevilian and Castilian schools, Cristbbal Morales, Francisco Guerrero, and Tomas Luis de Victoria. One author who partook fully in the musical excitement of the time was Jorge de Montemayor, best known for his pastoral novel, Los siete libros de la Diana (Valencia, 1559). Living in a period called the most brilliant epoch in the history of European music, Jorge de Montemayor left his native Portugal and went to Spain to become a chapel singer, first in the court of Charles V, and then in that of Philip II. In the service of Philip II, notable patron of Spanish music, Montemayor was able to cultivate his voice and expand his knowledge of instruments to the point that he came to be held in singular esteem by the royal family, no small accomplishment for a foreigner in a choir made up exclusively of Spaniards, with the exception of the French composer Philippe de Monte who temporarily joined the choir between 1554-1555. Like the great musicians and singers of the court of Philip II, Montemayor had travelled extensively to many parts of Europe including Naples, the residence of the Spanish viceroys. These journeys represented an unquestionably fecund source of information on musical techniques and styles. Let us be