Showing papers in "Hispanic Review in 1998"

Issues in the Phonology and Morphology of the Major Iberian Languages

Abstract: This collection explores current issues in the phonology and morphology of the major Iberian languages: Basque, Catalan, Galician, Portuguese, and Spanish. Most of the essays are based on innovative theoretical frameworks and show how recent revolutions in theoretical ideas have affected the study of these languages. Distinguished scholars address a diverse range of topics, including: stress assignment, phonological variability, distribution of rhotics, the imperative paradigm, focus, pluralization, spirantization, intonation, prosody, apocope, epenthesis, palatalization, and depalatalization.

Women's Acts: Plays by Women Dramatists of Spain’s Golden Age

Abstract: Seventeenth-century Spain witnessed a rich flowering of dramatic activity that paralleled the Renaissance stage in other European countries. Yet this Golden Age traditionally has been represented in print almost entirely by male playwrights. With "Women's Acts," Teresa Scott Soufas makes available eight plays by five long-neglected women dramatists: Angela de Azevedo, Ana Caro Mallen de Soto, Leonor de la Cueva y Silva, Feliciana Enriquez de Guzman, and Marla de Zayas y Sotomayor.In an age when moralists denounced women's participation in the public arena, these women transgressed traditional gender ideology by creating works for the secular stage. Female characters in their plays portray the contradictions in their society's expectations for women. Ranging from an empress whose unmarried state distresses her subjects, to a woman who adopts male behavior patterns in courtship, and another who must dress like a man in order to be heard in court, female characters show how difficult it was for women to find fulfillment during a time when their opportunities were limited.In her introduction, Soufas reviews the development of sixteenth- and seventeenth- century Spanish drama while focusing on the position of women during this period, the significance of these plays, and the issues the playwrights address. Each dramatist's section opens with an overview of the author's life and professional activity, a synopsis of her work(s), and a selected bibliography.In a modernized edition that is consistent, readable, and suitable for use by both students and scholars, the plays in "Women's Acts" will at last earn their rightful place in the canon of Renaissance drama.

The Oxford book of Latin American short stories

Abstract: The Oxford Book of Latin American Short Stories Edited by Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria When Latin American writers burst onto the world literary scene in the now famous "Boom" of the sixties, it seemed as if an entire literature had invented itself over night out of thin air. Not only was the writing extraordinary but its sudden and spectacular appearance itself seemed magical. In fact, Latin American literature has a long and rich tradition that reaches back to the Colonial period and is filled with remarkable writers too little known in the English-speaking world. The short story has been a central part of this tradition, from Fray Bartolome de las Casas' narrative protests against the Spanish Conquistadors' abuses of Indians, to the world renowned Ficciones of Jorge Luis Borges, to the contemporary works of such masters as Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Rosario Ferre, and others. Now, in The Oxford Book of Latin American Short Stories, editor Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria brings together fifty-three stories that span the history of Latin American literature and represent the most dazzling achievements in the form. In his fascinating introduction, Gonzalez Echevarria traces the evolution of the short story in Latin American literature, explaining why the genre has flourished there with such brilliance, and illuminating the various cultural and literary tensions that resolve themselves in "magical realism." The stories themselves exhibit all the inventiveness, the luxuriousness of language, the wild metaphoric leaps and uncanny conjunctions of the ordinary with the fantastic that have given the Latin American short story its distinctive and unforgettable flavor: From the Joycean subtlety of Machado de Assis's "Midnight Mass," to the brutal parable of Julio Ramon Ribeyro's "Featherless Buzzards," to the startling disorientation of Alejo Carpentier's "Journey Back to the Source," (which is told backwards, because a sorcerer has waved his wand and made time flow in reverse), to the haunting reveries of Maria Luisa Bombal's "The Tree." Readers familiar with only the most popular Latin American writers will be delighted to discover many exciting new voices here, including Catalina de Erauso, Ricardo Palma, Rubin Dario, Augusto Roa Bastos, Christina Peri Rossi, along with Borges, Garcia Marquez, Fuentes, Cortazar, Vargas Llosa, and many others. Gonzalez Echevarria also provides brief and extremely helpful headnotes for the each selection, discussing the author's influences, major works, and central themes. Short story lovers will find a wealth of satisfactions here, in terrains both familiar and uncharted. But the unique strength of The Oxford Book of Latin American Short Stories is that it allows us to see the connections between writers from Peru to Puerto Rico and from the sixteenth century to the present--and thus to view in a single, unprecedented volume one of the most diverse and fertile literary landscapes in the world.

The performing spectator in Alejo Carpentier's fictional world

Abstract: scenario's deceit. When the protagonist steps offstage into a group of actors awaiting their cues, the reader discerns that this is a play set: "Al tiempo sali de la luz, pues son6 el disparo del cazador y un pajaro cay6 en escena desde el segundo tercio de bambalinas. El mirifiaque de mi esposa vo16 por sobre mi cabeza, pues me hallaba precisamente donde le tocara entrar, estrechaindole el ya angosto paso" (68). This scene's most striking feature is the narrator's curious position. As the recalcitrant spectator of a dramatic scenario, he strolls through the fictitious space and pauses on the boundary between onstage and off, neither a participant in the drama nor a conventional audience member. This uncertain position anticipates the alienated protagonist's ontological dilemma throughout the novel, as he seeks the participatory immediacy of an earlier world as an anti-

In search of salvation: the deification of isabel la catolica in converso poetry'

Abstract: Les etudes modernes concernant le pro-feminisme dans la litterature espagnole du XV e siecle ont identifie plusieurs facteurs qui ont inspire les ecrivains pour defendre les femmes dans leurs travaux. Ce n'est donc pas un hasard s'il existe une tendance a deifier Isabelle la Catholique dans la poesie des conversos a la meme epoque, c'est-a-dire dans les premieres annees de son regne, 1474-1480. L'A. fait la recension des procedes litteraires qui participent a cette tendance. Puis il analyse les causes de ladite deification

La joven poesia espanola. notas para una periodizacion

Abstract: , .o AL como apuntara T. S. Eliot hace ya bastantes , anos, cada generaci6n hace su propia lectura de la tradici6n, la asimila a sus gustos, opta por la revalorizaci6n de aquellos caminos esteticos que le son m~s afines y denuesta otros que para generaciones precedentes tuvieron una validez irrevocable. En consecuencia, el cambio de un gusto generacional implica un cambio en el canon estetico dominante, que, por lo tanto, no tiene un caraicter atemporal y eterno, como pretende Harold Bloom en El canon de Occidente, sino que, muy al contrario, adquiere un caricter de continua transformaci6n, de eterna caida en el tiempo, por usar la metdfora de Cioran. El canon de la tradici6n resulta, pues, baisicamente indefinible si no es a traves de diversas secciones sincr6nicas realizadas a lo largo del discurrir de la Historia, que nos muestran cudl ha sido el canon dominante en cada momento, o sea la lectura de la tradici6n que se hizo entonces. No otra cosa pretende la historia de las ideas esteticas. Por lo tanto, cada generaci6n, en su lectura de la tradici6n, se lee a sfi misma. Hay que tener en cuenta, por otro lado, que el gusto estetico de una determinada 6poca s6lo resulta monolftico desde la perspectiva de la distancia temporal, para comprobar, en cuanto nos aproximamos al objeto de estudio, que es un haz de tendencias, muchas de ellas contradictorias, el que lo conforma; y es precisamente el hecho de que existan tales contradicciones, tales reacciones internas, lo que

Estudio de los nombres de los oficios artesanales en castellano medieval

Abstract: Los motivos que me han inducido a la eleccion del tema de naturaleza onomasiologica de esta tesis doctoral han sido dos: su interes filologico y su interes historico. He encontrado 197 nombres de oficios artesanales que los he dividido en siete grupos segun la materia prima con la que trabajaban los artesanos. El estudio se ha limitado a los nombres de los oficios castellanos dejando aparte aquellos que solo estan testimoniados en documentos catalanes o en documentos mozarabes. Dentro del estudio de cada termino he considerado dos aspectos distintos y complementarios en la historia de cada vocablo: el onomasiologico y el semasiologico. Dado el numero de documentos consultados he podido hacer una pequena aportacion (lexicologica, cronologica, semantica, etc.) a una parcela onomasiologica tan interesante como es la de los nombres de oficios artesanales, muchos de ellos desaparecidos hace siglos del lexico espanol.

Philip of Spain

Abstract: Philip II of Spain, ruler of the most extensive empire the world had ever known, has been viewed in a harsh and negative light since his death in 1598. Identified with repression, bigotry and fanaticism by his enemies, he has been judged more by the political events of his reign than by his person. This book is published 400 years after Philip's death. Placing him within that social, cultural, religious and regional context of his times, it presents a picture of his character and reign. Drawing on Philip's unpublished correspondence and on many other archival sources, Henry Kamen reveals much about Philip the youth, the man, the husband, the father, the frequently troubled Christian and the king. Kamen finds that Philip was a cosmopolitan prince whose extensive experience of northern Europe broadened his cultural imagination and tastes, whose staunchly conservatives ideas were far from being illiberal and fanatical, whose religious attitudes led him to accept a practical coexistence with protestants and jews, and whose support for Las Casas and other defenders of the Indians in America helped determine government policy.