Showing papers in "Hispanic Review in 2001"

La Invención de España : Nacionalismo Liberal e Identidad Nacional

Abstract: La invencion de Espana. Nacionalismo liberal e identidad nacional. By Inman Fox. Madrid: Catedra, 1997. 224 pages. A new book on modern ideology and literature by Inman Fox, to whom we owe so many elucidations of Spanish writers of the turn of the last century, must command attention. The book makes a very promising start by exploring the "invention" of national identity according to the concepts of nationalism formulated with great precision, among others, by Benedict Anderson and Eric Hobsbawm. For these authors the construction of nationality is a conscious process, which has to be consensual and depends on language and literary expression as its cultural glue; the same tongue is not necessarily shared by all the members of the nation-state, but a written-- language commanding common assent or at least acquiescence is an essential feature. Such ideas are of great relevance to modern Spanish political ideology. . In successive chapters, and drawing on much previously published material, Fox sums up the contributions of the Ateneo, the Institution Libre, historians like Lafuente and Canovas, regenerationalists like Costa and Altamira and the school of Menendez Pidal to the construction of a liberal-- based national identity, essentially Castilian-centered, before arriving in chapter vii to the figures we associate with the Generation of 98 and commenting finally on the "otra Espana," traditionalist and authoritarian, which fed on some of its ideas. Unfortunately, he refers to the "imagined community" concept only desultorily and without following up its indications or fully justifying his own title. He does not consider, for instance, the deleterious effect Ortega's insistence that only Castile has real conditions of leadership (180) has on the chances of incorporating peripheral nationalities into a common "imagined community." When he comments perceptively on Azorin's importance in the establishment of the canon of Spanish literature (137), we might add that this canon manages to evade completely the great contributions of Catalonia and Galicia to medieval Spain. And that there are other historic townships or landscapes worthy of aesthetic attention other those of Castile and, by extension, Andalusia. Interesting aspects of these chapters are the critical approach to Ganivet's sense of history (though I miss any reference to Javier Herrero's book on Ganivet or Herbert Ramsden's studies of Ganivet and Unamuno), and the perceptive comments on Ortega's attitude to Azorin and Baroja. On Machado, there is a certain confusion between poems on Castile published in 1912 and those printed subsequently (155-56). The major opportunity that is missed concerns the "nacionalismos perifericos." Fox makes a worthy effort to take Catalan and Basque nationalism into account by devoting a chapter to them, but his analysis is almost entirely derivative from secondary sources. Despite an awareness of the relation between industrial strength and the rise of Catalan nationalism and some welcome detailed attention to Almirall and Prat de la Riba, a critical analysis of Catalanist ideology and motivation from inside is largely lacking. …

The literature of misogyny in medieval Spain : the "Arcipreste de Talavera" and the "Spill"

Abstract: Acknowledgements Introduction: the preacher and the physician Part I. Disease and the Medieval Clinic: 1. Disease, discourse, and illness: the structure of healing in late medieval Spain 2. Sexual pathology and the etiology of lovesickness Part II. The Arcipreste de Talavera and the Spill: 3. The poetics of infection 4. The poetics of the compendium and the conditions of the clinic 5. The tortured body and the abjectified voice: additional therapeutic strategies Part III. The Triumph of the Clinic: 6. Women, the power to disease and the fictions of the counter-clinic Notes Works cited Index.

Loyola's Acts: The Rhetoric of the Self

Abstract: Loyola's Acts. The Rhetoric of the Set: By Marjorie O'Rourke Boyle. Berkeley: U of California P, 1997. 274 pages. The so-called autobiography of Ignatius of Loyola is a textual scholar's nightmare: it covers but 17 years (1521-1538) of the saint's 65-year life, and was dictated by its subject. Its Portuguese scribe reconstructed it from a temporal and geographic distance, rendering some of it in Spanish to a Spanish scribe, then dictating the rest to an Italian scribe. As Boyle indicates, it is five times removed from Ignatius's lips, and not even a manuscript of the complete Spanish/Italian version exists. A highly unstable narrative, Loyola's Acta attract speculative interpretations, which have historically tended toward literal readings. Boyle proposes that as epideictic, its primary purpose was to praise God, not represent Ignatius in a historical fashion, and reading it was intended to produce a moral impression, which the author elucidates by typecasting Loyola as he moves through it. Emphasizing the Acta's first episodes, she selects its textual models from a very wide gamut of texts ranging from classical and Biblical works to sixteenth century literature. "The Knight Errant" is young, chivalric Ignatius, whose early follies and vanities are meant to instruct by via negativa. Here as throughout the book, Boyle adduces evidence from far-ranging texts (to cite a few, Plautus, Homer, and d'Etaples) to set forth her thesis that the young hero's stand against the French in Pamplona constitutes a prideful act rather than a valiant one. She immediately identifies the principle sin with which she believes Ignatius grapples throughout the Acta as vainglory. Leaving nothing to literal reading, she finds, for example, that the limp which resulted from surgery to Loyola's wounded leg symbolizes "the imbalance of intellect and will" of humanity, and the fallen Adam himself (44). "The Ascetic" treats the saint's travels to Montserrat and Manresa, pausing at length over Loyola's reported dispute with a Moor about the Immaculate Conception, after which he fails to defend his "Lady's" honor, and winds up letting his mule decide between the path to revenge against the Moor (who represents the heretic) or to Montserrat, an episode laden with chivalric fantasy; Boyle prefers to relate the incident to Hercules at the crossroads rather than Amadis at the same, and this tendency to read the Acta in light of remote literary sources rather than more period-specific models is characteristic of her interpretation. …

Advances in Hispanic Linguistics: Papers from the 2nd Hispanic Linguistics Symposium

Abstract: Advances in Hispanic Linguistics: Papers from the 2nd Hispanic Linguistics Symposium. Ed. Javier Gutierrez-Rexach and Fernando Martinez-Gil. 2 vols. Somerville, MA. Cascadilla, 1999. 578 pages. This collection of English-language articles, which touch all areas of Hispanic linguistics, resulted from the conference mentioned in the title and held at the Ohio State University in Columbus in October of 1998. Shortly thereafter, the editors produced a gem-a set of high-quality papers in two beautifully printed paperback volumes promulgated by an up-and-coming publisher of conference proceedings. Volume i contains the introduction and acknowledgments, Section 1: "Psycholinguistics and Sociolinguistics," and Section 2: "Phonology, Morphology, and Historical Linguistics," whereas Volume ii includes only Section 3: "Syntax, Semantics, and Pragmatics." The articles include their own bibliography, each of which has followed the same standard format. Even though the fonts used have not adhered to the same pattern, the changes in font from article to article in no way distract from the excellent attributes of the content or the printing. Of the 48 papers presented at the conference only 37 were included in this set of selected proceedings. The editors have carefully chosen articles that employ more traditional theoretical models and those that utilize current standards of linguistic thought (e.g., Optimality Theory applied to problems of historical linguistics). The compendium highlights scholarship from younger researchers as well as that of more established ones. In the latter group one will find names such as Frank Nuessel, John Lipski, Jose Ignacio Hualde, Marta Lujan, Rafael Nunez Cedeno, Diane Ringer Uber, Robert Hammond, Paula Kempchinsky, and Thomas Walsh, among others. While all of the articles merit praise for their caliber, some require special attention. Therefore, this review will comment on a subset of the selected proceedings, either for their superior presentation or because the research requires particular commentary. In her article on the various interpretations of the oft-caricatured syntactic marker nomas, Mary Ellen Garcia proceeds with an historical overview of its use in Spanish from Latin to the present day. She points out that the Spanish American nomas is generally equivalent to the Spanish use of nada mds and she gives many examples to prove her hypothesis that the adverb serves to limit and/or emphasize something in a conversation, especially in the Spanish of San Antonio, Texas. Diane Ringer Uber, an established expert in Spanish American phonology, has most recently been investigating the pronouns of address in Spanish America. …

Las polémicas literarias en la España del siglo XVI: a propósito de Fernando de Herrera y Garcilaso de la Vega

Abstract: Las polemical literarias en la Espana del siglo XVI: a proposito de Fernando de Herrera y Garcilaso de la Vega. By Bienvenido Morros Mestres. Barcelona: Quaderns Crema, 1998. 338 pages. It is by now a truism to assert that every generation of scholars judges the work of its predecessors from different perspectives. Twentieth-century specialists have gone through several phases in the appreciation of critical works written in the Renaissance. Studied first as historical documents, they were dismissed as unreliable and methodologically defective. From the perspective of modern philology, the humanists' reconstruction of classical literature and culture appears uninformed; their use of sources, at times unacknowledged, foreign to present concerns for accuracy of bibliographical reference. Thus R. Pring-Mill defined as "plagiarism" Herrera's unacknowledged borrowings from J. C. Scaliger's works. Yet in his erudite and thought-provoking book, Morros prefers to deal with these aspects of Renaissance scholarship from an historicist perspective. His goal is precisely to discover upon which sources Herrera based his annotations to the work of Garcilaso, in order to reconstruct the particular understanding of classical literature, philosophy and science that a humanist could have had in Seville in the decade of the 1570's, when Herrera, probably annoyed at the publication of El Brocense's edition in 1574, decides to distance his own philological work, which appeared in 1580, from that of the famous humanist in Salamanca If El Brocense had preferred to emphasize questions of textual criticism, of emendatio in particular, producing a series of brief notes with only a cursory identification of Garcilaso's sources, Herrera would write a collection of scholia according to traditional techniques. Thus he combined the accesses ad auctores with the enarratio, which encompassed not only lexical observations (verborum interpretatio) but also information about contextual matters (historiarum cognitio). He also included some digressions on disputed topics, transforming his scholia into a small paideia about poetry and poetics, in the tradition of other Renaissance treatises, upon which he actually relied to write his own short essays. In Chapter I, Morros discloses Herrera's sources and its particular use in the Anotaciones, "a polyphonic work" built by means of contaminatio of Greek and Latin, ancient and modern texts. Morros proves that imitatio was the main mode of production not only of literary texts but also of exegetical discourses in the sixteenth century. Herrera's fluid prose results from the combination of discrete segments of discourse, which Morros, showing a solid knowledge of classical and Renaissance literature, and acting as a true detective, is able to identify in the work of his predecessors. We now confirm which precise sections derive from Scaliger's works and which derive from undisclosed sources, such as De deis gentium varies et multiplex historia and Historia poetarum tam Graecorum cum Latinorum, of the Italian humanist Lilio Gregorio Giraldo, an influential author that Quevedo still quoted and argued with in his own Anacreon castellano (1609). …

The Social Conscience in Latin-American Writing

Abstract: The Social Conscience in Latin-American Writing. By Naomi Lindstrom. Austin: U of Texas P, 1998. 187 pages. The purpose of this extremely useful book is to illuminate the historical and social dynamics of contemporary Latin American literature and criticism. Lindstrom surveys the literary terrain by focusing on five topics important in literary criticism and originating in the social sciences: dependency theory, postmodernism, testimonial narrative, the intellectual and mass culture, and women's writing and gender issues. She discusses the development of each theme, the principal arguments within each and how these have been adapted to Latin America's hybrid cultural traditions and social realities. Examples from literary texts illustrate each topic. Lindstrom shows that dependency theory came about in the 1960s as a critique of the prevailing mentality in economic development circles that equated progress with technical advancement. The theory, which centers on the opposition between metropolis and periphery, has evolved radically in recent decades and, to Lindstrom, is currently represented by the interactive concept of transculturation. For its depiction of the overwhelming influence that U.S. commercial culture exerts in Latin America and that large urban centers hold over small provincial towns, Lindstrom chooses Puig's Betrayed by Rita Hayworth to illustrate dependency theory as originally conceived. In the chapter on postmodernism, Lindstrom asks what is postmodern about Latin American literature. The historic mestizaje of styles? The growing body of testimonial literature? The declining influence of master narratives? Lindstrom refers to essays by noted intellectuals as she lays out various positions in the debate, including the relationship between post-- boom literature and postmodernism in Latin America. With the caveat that there is no agreed upon body of postmodern literature in Latin America, Lindstrom selects Puig's novels, such as Kiss of the Spider Woman, as best exemplifying a postmodernist blending of high and popular culture. Testimonial literature represents the most controversial category in Latin American literary criticism today for its boundary-breaking implications. As in her discussion of postmodernism, Lindstrom takes pains to point out that there is no accepted definition of the term. Some testimonials are eye-witness accounts by representative members of nonliterate ethnic minorities. Others consist of ethnographic or ideological studies. Lindstrom addresses the heated question of authorship of this hybrid genre, highlighting the narrative examples of Menchu/Burgos, I, Rigoberta Menchu and Montejo/Barnet, Autobiography of a Runaway Slave. …

A Medieval Pilgrim's Companion: Reassessing El libro de los huespedes (Escorial MS.h.I.13)

Abstract: In this book, Thomas Spaccarelli argues that the Escorial codex usually published and studied as nine separate saints' lives and romances is in fact a unified and organized whole. He shows how the codex is intimately related to the pilgrimage route to Santiago de Compostela and to the religious, literary, and artistic traditions associated with it. Spaccarelli elucidates the Libro's ideology of pilgrimage.

Blood Mother/Milk Mother: Breastfeeding, the Family, and the State in Antonio de Guevara's Relox de Principes (Dial of Princes)

Abstract: IN The Origin of the Milky Way Tintoretto paints Juno's lactating breasts creating the galaxy (Figure 1). In this scene, Jupiter attempts to guarantee the immortality of his son born of the mortal Alcmene by holding Hercules to suck on the sleeping Juno's breast. She awakens however, and her spilled milk gives rise to the Milky Way and to lilies on earth. While this painting points to the fascination lactating women held for artists of the day and to the power to create and nurture life, it also problematizes the role of the father at this stage of the child's life. Indisputably, breastfeeding is an area exclusively reserved for women.1 Yet, in this work and many of the Renaissance treatises on how to raise a family, the father appears as a persuasive force in determining the child's best interests. How does this authoritative figure exercise his dominant role within the family structure? How is he able to govern the family politic even at the stage when the child's principal needs can only be fulfilled by the mother, either blood mother or milk mother (a term used to designate the relationship between wet nurse and child)? Is it possible that breastfeeding forced men to concede at least some of the child-rearing authority to women and extend to them an independence that in other developmental stages was not granted? In the Relox de Principes (Dial of Princes), Antonio de Guevara attempts to define the father's role in the traditional family structure. While the rules he lays down for marriage, pregnancy, and the child's education clearly point to the male as the authority figure whose decisions are incontestable, Guevara struggles to locate the father in an equally important role during the child's breastfeeding years. Antonio de Guevara (1481-1545) is an overlooked Renaissance figure.2 Bishop of Guadix in Granada and later of Mondonedo in Galicia, commissioner for the Inquisitor General, official chronicler and travelling companion of Charles I (Charles V of the Holy Roman Empire), he formed part of the main political circles of the day. Guevara was also a prolific writer, whose writing played an important role in the development of Castilian literature in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and was admired and translated all over Europe in his lifetime. In 1529 Relox de principes, which is an expanded version of his already famous Libro aureo de Marco Aurelio (Golden Book of Marcus Aurelius), is published and immediately becomes the favorite book of Charles I and later of his son, Philip II. In fact, according to Quentin Skinner, following the Bible the Relox is the most widely read book in sixteenth-century Europe (215). Guevara's manual for the education of princes was first published at a time when Charles I was struggling to unify Spain, a country whose customs, coinage, language and political institutions varied from one territory to the next. The Relox is divided into three books. The first explains how to be a successful Christian prince; the second, how the male reader should interact with his wife and raise his children; and the third describes the virtues of a prince. Located between two books dealing with the prince's role in governing the state, Book II's position within the text points to Guevara's attempt to link the needs of the state with the needs of the family. It is only natural that Guevara would take a patriarchal view of the state and family and that he would feel entitled to speak on those subjects with authority because he himself was part of a patriarchal structure in a church that held enormous sway in Spain. The Holy Office of the Inquisition-an institution that was an instrument of royal policy and politically subject to the crown-regulated matters on family interaction. Although Alfonso el Sabio's Siete Partidas included laws that regulated family structures, including the role of the wet nurse and characteristics she should possess, official public policy on family values yielded to the provincial fueros. …

Essays in Hispanic Linguistics dedicated to Paul M. Lloyd

Abstract: Essays in Hispanic Linguistics Dedicated to Paul M. Lloyd. Eds. Robert J. Blake, Diana L. Ransom and Roger Wright. Newark, DE: Juan de la Cuesta, 1999. x+258 pages. This volume honors Paul Lloyd on the occasion of his 70th birthday. Lloyd himself is the topic of the first article, "Paul M. Lloyd: A Scholarly Portrait and Bibliography," by Steven Dworkin. It includes a brief professional Biography, a useful annotated Bibliography of the honorand's publications, and a listing of book reviews written by him. The other 15 articles, contributed by longtime colleagues and former students, are arranged in apparently random order. All develop topics that have been of interest to Lloyd, including lexical change (5 articles), morphology (2), phonology (3), syntax (2), historical linguistic theory (1), dialectology and sociolinguistics (1), and the history of Hispanic linguistics (2). Anthony Esposito ("Italian niente `to be stiff or numb with cold,' aterecerse> `to become stiff or numb with cold,' and Sp. derretirse/Port. derreterse > `to melt, thaw'") argues convincingly for the related development of these terms from a common etymon DERIGERE, which suffers prefixation, change of prefix, change of verb class, reassignment of phonemes, and metathesis. Carmen Silva-Corvalan ("Ahora: From temporal to discourse deixis") uses data on contemporary Chilean Spanish to examine the extension of ahora from a temporal to a discourse deictic marking (re)introduction of topics, conditions, and qualifications. Such extension appears to be a prototypical case of "subjectifying" grammaticalization, but the claim needs to be confirmed with historical evidence. Birte Stengaard ("Subject-Role and the Re-lexicalization of Old Spanish and Old Portuguese aver") analyzes the spread of tener/ter into domains formerly associated with haber/aver, arguing that this change is best understood as a case of relexicalization in which the subject-roles and meanings of haber were reassigned to tener. Ray Harris-Northall ("Morphological Shift in Old Spanish: The Paradigmatic Relationship between -ecer and -ir verbs") points out that the medieval tendency to transfer -ir verbs to the -ecer class was closely related to other verbal processes, including the disappearance of the -udo participle. He argues that few additions to the -ecer class were made after the 13' century, when the increase in raising of stem-vowels in -ir class verbs halted their transfer. Joel Rini ("The Rise and Fall of Old Spanish 'y'all': vos todos vs. vos otros") establishes the initial preference for vos todos over vos otros in Alfonsine texts, and then argues that vos otros displaces vos todos due to the greater morphological fit between novel vosotros and existent vuestro. Diana Ranson ("Variation in Voicing in Spanish Syncopated Forms") analyzes 149 words showing variable results with regard to voicing of consonants brought into contact through syncope. …

Partial Glimpses of the Infinite: Borges and the Simulacrum

Abstract: The face that is gazed on as it gazes ... -Borges, "Mirrors" When the real is no longer what is used to be, nostalgia assumes its full meaning. -Baudrillard, Simulations We have become simulacra. -Deleuze, The Logic of Sense I EAN Baudrillard begins Simulations with a quotation from Ecclesiastes: "The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth-it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true" (1). This quotation, itself a simulacrum of the original Ecclesiastes (it turns out that Baudrillard's quotation does not appear in the Biblical text), sets the tone for the well-known discussion of simulation that follows. The first paragraph of this seminal work, however, is given over to a brief analysis of Jorge Luis Borges' short text "Del rigor en la ciencia" (El hacedor), a "story" of a map being drawn to fit exactly-and thus replace-the terrain and territory it depicts: the story is about how the Real is displaced by its representation. (In fact Borges' story itself is a kind of simulacrum being as it is a translation-or "transcription," the word is crucial for Borges-of a portion of J.A. Suarez Miranda's 1658 Viajes de varones prudentes: part of the effect of Borges' writing is to call into question the very nature of origins, of "originality.") Despite its complexity, Borges' tale of the simulacrum of the territory is figured by Baudrillard as "having nothing but the discrete charm of second-order simulacra" (1), by which he means that Borges' depiction of the simulacrum is of a primitive sort, merely that of the "map, the double, the mirror of the concept" (1).1 The second order of simulacra, according to Baudrillard's own taxonomy (which details four orders), merely "masks and perverts a basic reality" (11) and does not, like the fourth order simulacrum which destroys "all of metaphysics" (4), threaten the basic ontology of the universe or, more precisely, our experience of the universe. The fourth order of simulacra "substitutes signs of the real for the real itself' (4) and problematizes any discussion of truth, falsity, appearance, and the Real. Although the argument of Simulations is well known, it may do to reproduce Baudrillard's classification of what he calls the "successive phases of the image" (11) as it progresses to the phase of simulation. His purpose is to demonstrate the distinction between representation and simulation, suggesting that representation still participates in the metaphysics of presence: Whereas representation tries to absorb simulation by interpreting it as a false representation, simulation envelops the whole edifice of representation as itself a simulation. This would be the successive phases of the image: it is the reflection of a basic reality it masks and perverts a basic reality it masks the absence of a basic reality it bears no relation to any reality whatever: it is its own pure simulacrum. (11) Baudrillard's analysis of the simulacrum is intended to demonstrate that the simulacrum ultimately confuses the distinction between the real and its illusion, its representation. Simulations thus ultimately becomes a touchstone of postmodern theory offering as it does the idea that ontological confusion is the norm in an historical period that no longer is able to maintain the distinction between the Real and its representation, between the original and its copy, between the metaphysical and the physical. Baudrillard's use of Borges in Simulations, especially his idea that Borges' work operates within the second-order of the simulacrum, suggests that Borges' explorations of the simulacrum, the double, the mirror, and the "abysmal" nature of language, are still articulated by a metaphysical apprehension of the world, that underlying his endless textual and verbal abysms is a recourse to a grounding belief in an original and originating system that gives some order to experience. …

The Archpriest of Hita and the Imitators of Ovid: A Study in the Ovidian Background of the Libro De Buen Amor

Abstract: The Archpriest of Hita and the Imitators of Ovid: A Study in the Ovidian Background of the Libro de buen amor. By Richard Burkard. Newark, DE: Juan de la Cuesta, 1999. 200 pages. While the Ovidian subtext of the Archpriest's book has become a commonplace of Libro de buen amor criticism, Burkard argues in his Preface that Juan Ruiz probably had no direct knowledge of the Ars amatoria--nor for that matter of any authentic work by the Roman poet--but rather depended on imitative Ovidian literature, most notably the Pseudo-Ars amatoria, the Pamphilus de amore, and the De vetula. The six subsequent chapters of his book exhaustively document and reiterate this assertion. In Chapter One, "The Ars Amatoria and the Latin Middle Ages," Burkard notes that Ovid's amatory works were widely circulated throughout the twelfth century and expounded upon in the clerical schools, spawning a veritable classroom industry of imitative verse. He typifies this derivative production as combining the sacred and the profane, promoting sexual promiscuity, satirically portraying prevailing social and ecclesiastical conventions, presenting standard themes in accordance with rhetorical guidelines, resorting to parody and the farcical, and purporting to represent personal experience and the autobiographical, characteristics that also apply to Ovid's original poetry. Burkard then examines the Pamphilus, the Pseudo-Ars amatoria, and the De amore by Andreas Capellanus as twelfth-century imitations that mediated the Ovidian tradition to Juan Ruiz. In Chapter Two, "De Amore," Burkard revisits Lecoy's suggested parallels between the texts of the Archpriest and the Chaplain; by contrasting Juan Ruiz's use of a known source text (the Pamphilus) with his purported use of the De amore, he eschews any direct dependency. His reasoning strikes me as neither compelling nor persuasive. While the contrast indicates that the Archpriest (obviously) did not translate the De amore as he did the Pamphilus, it does not justify Burkard's consequent dismissal of the Latin treatise as a source, particularly since he does not address Dorothy Clotelle Clarke's detailed and insightful analysis ("Juan Ruiz and Andreas Capellanus," Hispanic Review 40 [1972]: 390-411). Burkard's most substantive contribution, in my view, is his third chapter, "Pseudo-Ars Amatoria," where he convincingly establishes the mid-to late twelfth-century Pseudo-Ars-rather than Ovid's ars amandi--as the principal source for Don Amor's lecture (st. 423-575) to the disgruntled Archpriest-protagonist. Tracing ten precepts of love that appear in both the Don Amor lecture and the pseudo-Ovidian composition, Burkard posits that, while Juan Ruiz did not confine himself to a single source for his amatory notions, the Pseudo-Ars provided him with a skeletal outline for linking previously independent pieces (the tale of the lazy suitors, Pitas Payas, the power of money, the drunken hermit). …

Rayuela's confused hermeneutics

Abstract: JULIO Cortazar's Rayuela is or was at one time infamous for two things: its self-conscious metafictionality and its sexist nomenclature. The following selection from chapter 34, with the lines broken here as they are in the Catedra edition of 1992, serves as a helpful introduction to both: Esto y otras cosas que observe despues en sociedad, Wcie...?De que esta hablando el tipo? Por ahi acaba de ronme comprender los bruscos adelantos que nuestra capital mencionar a Paris y a Londres, habla de gustos y de fortuhabia realizado desde el 68, adelantos mas parecidos a saltos nas, ya ves, Maga, ya ves, ahora estos ojos se arrastran irocaprichosos que al andar progresivo y firme de los que saben nicos por donde vos andabas emocionada, convencida de adonde van; mas no eran por eso menos reales. En una que te estabas cultivando una barbaridad porque lefas a un palabra, me daba en la nariz cierto tufillo de cultura europea, novelista espanol con foto en la contratapa, pero justamende bienestar y aun de riqueza y trabajo. te el tipo habla de tufillo de cultura europea. (343) Eventually, a reader comes to make sense of the chapter. After a long struggle to help Horacio Oliveira, the protagonist, overcome his cancerous hyper-self-consciousness, his lover, La Maga, has finally abandoned him. Horacio is now reading a novel, Galdos' Lo prohibido, that La Maga left behind. Cortazar represents Horacio's typitally self-conscious thoughts with a clever typographical gimmick: he writes the chapter in alternating narrative strands, the oddnumbered lines recording Horacio's rote, aloof reading of the novel's words, the even-numbered lines relating his thoughts as he mocks the writing style for being old-fashioned and La Maga for being so unsophisticated as to let it win her over. The chapter exemplifies the metafictionality characteristic of Rayuela because the alternating strands do not just represent the self-consciousness of the character, they also impose this selfconsciousness on the reader: we cannot read this chapter without becoming painfully aware of the reading process. The chapter introduces us to the sexism of Cortazar's novel because Horacio's amused contempt for La Maga's mode of reading anticipates the basic theoretical premise of the notorious "second book" of the novel: that there are two kinds of reader, the "lector-hembra" and the "lector activo" or "lector complice." The distinction is explained by a character named Morelli, himself a writer of radical novels, who serves as Rayuela's internal theorist: the lector-hembra reads a book passively, a mere witness to the creative production of the author; the lector activo, by contrast, consciously participates in the creation of the novel he reads. On the basis of this distinction CortAzar offers us two options for reading his novel, which he explains in a page called the "Tablero de direccion." In the first option, we read the first fifty-six chapters straight through, from 1 to 56. This "first book," with its mostly conventional chapters, is for supposedly feebleminded and passive lectores-hembra like La Maga. In the second option, we also read the chapters of the first book, but with additional chapters 57-155 interpolated into the order according to a list printed at the bottom of the page: "73-1-2-116-384-. .. -58-131." Some of these additions, which Cortazar ironically entitles "capitulos prescindibles," could pass for one of the "inexpendable" chapters of the first book; others are scraps or fragments of apparently unrelated materials: newspaper excerpts, poems, or scraps from Morelli's notebooks. This second book, in which metafiction reigns, is for sophisticated, aggressive lectores activos like Horacio. The structural foundation of Rayuela, then, rests on stereotypical assumptions more outdated even than a novel by Galdos. Cortazar has apologized repeatedly for the first term, and he retained the labels as they were originally coined as a kind of penitential testimony to his former ignorance. …

Poesía importada: traducción poética y renovación literaria en España (1909-1936)

Abstract: Poesia importada. Traduccion poetics y renovacion literaria en Espana (1909-1936). By Miguel Gallego Roca. Almeria: Servicio de Publicaciones, U de Almeria, 1996. 324 pages. Between 1909 and 1936, as Miguel Gallego Roca documents in this study, Spanish intellectuals were as busy as bees rendering their foreign soul-mates into Spanish. Gallego Roca's first two chapters discuss the diffusion of translations during this period and they comment on the notion of "Two Spains": there were those who championed the art of translating (as enrichment) and those who condemned it (for squandering the Spanish genius). Gallego's subsequent five chapters evolve historically. First he turns his attention to "modern-tista" style translations; he then accounts for "vanguardia" and "Generation del 27" interests; and finally he discusses the Catholicism of Cruz y Raya. Chapter three (more than one third of the study) deals with prominent translators who rendered all poets into Hispanic "modernistas." This chapter's most intriguing sections deal with the indefatigable labors of Fernando Maristany who, following an English model of "The 100 Best Poems," produced between 1915 and 1924 eight anthologies of the "best" in French, English, Portuguese, German, Italian and even Classical poetry. Gallego portrays Maristany as a fascinating figure: a workaholic who was also a fin-de-siecle esthete, one who turned everything he touched into a purple patch of decadent languor replete with German "Sehnsucht" or Galician-- Portuguese "saudade." (Maristany's frequent collaborator was the "saudo-- sista" Teixeira de Pascoaes.) Gallego's study of these rapports de fans is a solid contribution to scholarship. Gallego also studies here Diez Canedo's three anthologies-1907, 1910, 1913-of Romance-language poets, Madariaga's translations of English poetry, Miguel Sanchez Pesquera's renditions of a number of English and North Americans, and Juan Pablo Rivas' anthology of poets from around the world. In separate sections he compares several translations of Mallarme, and various translations from Portuguese poets (particularly, Eugenio de Castro). In short, this is a comprehensive piece of research. Chapters four and five are devoted to a few avant-garde journals of the period: Prometeo, Alfar, Hennes and Prisma. Prometeo's offerings were more historical than avant-garde-e.g., some "casidas," poems by Walt Whitman, by A. Symons, and Eugenio de Castro's Salome. A(far, Hennes and Prisma, however, included such prominent figures as Pound and Sandburg, and via these journals Guillermo de Torre's translations (of Apollinaire, Jacob, Tzara, Marinetti) and Jorge Luis Borges' (of English, German and French contemporary poets) reached a Spanish audience. …

La Comedia Española y el Teatro Europeo del Siglo XVII

Abstract: La Comedia espanola en la Italia del siglo XVII - la "Commedia dell'Arte", Nancy L. d'Antuono Calderon y el teatro clasico frances, Alejandro Cioranescu "es dama o es torbellino?" - "La Dama Duende" en Francia de D'Ouville a Hauteroche, Frederick A. de Armas la Comedia espanola en la Inglaterra del siglo XVII, John Loftis Sir Richard Fanshawe y "Querer por Solo Querer" de Antonio Hurtado de Mendoza - el como y el pro que de una traduccion, Angel M. Garcia Gomez una traduccion flamenca de "La Devocion de la Cruz" de Calderon que no esta perdida, Henry W. Sullivan la Comedia lopesca y el teatro holandes de principios del siglo XVII - un temprano triunfo para Theodore Rodenburgh, Rina Walthaus la recepcion de la Comedia en la Europa de lengua alemana en el siglo XVII, Martin Franzbach los inicios del teatro espanol en la Polonia del siglo XVII, Florian Smieja.

Bullfighting. Art, Technique and Spanish Society

Abstract: Ernest Hemingway, best-known to layman and aficionado alike, in his fiction described bullfighting, or toreo, as a cross between romantic risk and a drunken party, or as an elaborate substitute for war, ending in wounds or death. Although his descriptions of the \"beauty\"in toreo are lyrical, they are short on imaginative creation of how such beauty, through techniques and discipline, comes about. Hemingway may have sculpted a personal mystique of toreo but, in the opinion of some, he ignored or slighted the full, unique nature of the subject. In Bullfighting: Art, Technique, and Spanish Society John McCormick sorts through the complexities of toreo, to suggest the aesthetic, social, and moral dimensions of an art that is geographically limited, but universal when seen in round. While having felt the attraction of Hemingway's approach, McCormick knew that he was being seduced by elements that had little to do with toreo. To try to right Hemingway's distortions, he named the first edition of this book The Complete Aficionado, but then realized that the volume was directed at more than just the spectator: BullFighting is written from the point of view of the torerro, as opposed to the usual spectator's impressions and enthusiasm. With the help of a retired matador de toros, Mario Sevilla Mascarenas, who taught McCormick the rudiments of toreo as well as the emotions and discipline essential to survival, the authors rescue 'toreo from romantic cliches. They probe the anatomy of the matador's training and technique, provide a past-and-present survey of the traditions of the corrida, and furnish dramatic portraits of such famous figures as Manolete, Joselito, Belmonte, and Ordonez. Here then is an informed analysis and critique of the origins and myths of toreo and a survey of the novels it has inspired. Defending the faith in a lively as well as clear and discerning manner, this volume provides a committed and vivid approach to the rich history, ritual, and symbolism of the bullfight as it currently exists.

Escrituras de la ciudad

Abstract: Escrituras de la ciudad. Ed. Jose Carlos Rovira Madrid: Palas Atenea, 1999. 282 pages. For many of us, the city is a way of life. Books that examine some aspect of urban reality, be it cultural, anthropological, sociological, economic or political, serve to remind us of the importance of reading the city as an emblem of modern culture. Escrituras de la ciudad, a collection of critical essays edited by Jose Carlos Rovira, does so by building upon ideas originally explored in Literatura y espacio urbano (1995), also edited by Rovira. Escrituras de la ciudad presents thirteen essays that explore the cityscape from diverse cultural vantage points such as Golden Age Spanish poetry, the Latin American avant-garde and Impressionist painting, making the anthology an enticing invitation to explore both Latin American and Spanish urban texts. The stroll through varied Hispanic cityscapes begins with Jose Angel Cilleruelo's essay "El 27 contra la ciudad." His references to various North American thinkers such as Thomas Jefferson and Henry David Thoreau provide the necessary context to explore the antagonism between city and country in the poetry of the Generation of 27. Cilleruelo's approach emphasizes the importance of understanding city-texts in relation to other cultural production, a comparative approach that is deployed by most of the contributors, and one of assets of the volume as a whole. In a second essay concerned with the Spanish cityscape, Jose Maria Ferri Col's presents a thorough analysis of urban ruins and the importance of these images for Spanish Golden Age poetry. Along the same comparative lines, Angel L. Prieto de Paula's essay on twentieth-century Spanish poetry provides an excellent overview on the city/country dichotomy with special attention given to poets writing during the civil war and in the early years of franquismo rule. Two of the more thought-provoking essays contained in the collection direct the reader's attention to visual representations of urban space. The editor's inclusion of analyses of multiple forms of media such as visual art and film, signals an affirmation of the importance of cross-disciplinary readings of the city. In his comparative overview of Western European and North American Impressionist art, Jose Costa Mas takes the reader on a leisurely stroll through painted urban parks and gardens, highlighting the nineteenth century's quest to urbanize nature. This analysis of Impressionism offers a satisfying overview of the importance of the city for the artistic movement as a whole. It would have been interesting for Costa Mas to also relate the Impressionist movement to the chronicles of Latin American modernistas, such as Manuel Gutierrez Najera Not only were the modernistas contemporaries of Impressionist painters, but for many of them Paris and things French were emblematic of modernity. Juan A. Rio Carratala continues the trajectory of the visual cityscape with his reading of films from the 1950's, with a special emphasis on those directed by Juan A. Bardem. Carratala's piece addresses not only the importance of reading films in dialogue with literary texts, but also draws attention to provincial cities which often remain in the shadows of the metropolis in studies of urban literature. …

Ernestina de Champourcín: a poet and her poetics

Abstract: ERNESTINA de Champourcin was a prolific poet who published in the 1920s at the same time as the members of the Generation of 27. She was one of the two female poets included in Gerardo Diego's landmark anthology of 1934, and she was called a prophetic priestess by Juan Ramon Jimenez in one of his lyrical portraits of his contemporaries collected in Espanoles de tres mundos. These gestures of recognition notwithstanding, her work has been marginalized from the official Spanish canon and, until very recently, forgotten. Her exclusion has been explained through a myriad of possible reasons: because her gynocentric style conflicts with the prevailing androcentric one (Wilcox), because her marriage diverted her attention to her husband (Ciplijauskaite), because of the condescension and sexism of critics and of her devotion to Juan Ramon (Debicki), or simply because "La tragedia de su vida fue nacer mujer en un mundo hecho a medida de los hombres" (Cardoso). Some recent critics have tried to vindicate this exclusion by including her in their monographs on Spanish women poets (Wilcox, Perez). Others have attempted to certify her as a poet in other ways. Jose Angel Ascunce calls her one of the most important women poets of the Generation of 27 (Prologue xi), and Luzmaria Jimenez Faro maintains she is the only woman poet of that group (Champourcin Antologia 11). What critics have not done yet is to treat her purely as a poet, as a professional writer who evolves over time in her relationship to her concept of poetry. Over her long career, Champourcin's poetry evolves from a repository for emotions to a site for aesthetic invention and finally to a vehicle of communication and transcendence. Her poetic persona begins as a passive receiver of poetry to become an active agent of creation and then a converser with sublime forces. Her changing creative posture mirrors the chronological progression of her life and the substantive advancement in the psychological development of her poetic speaker. The incipient poet speaks with the selfabsorption that characterizes the adolescent psyche. As the adult poet emerges, her poetic persona gains a sense of self-assurance that facilitates an assertive stance before the poetic enterprise. The mature woman finds self-fulfillment through poetry because it provides her a means to the jouissance or joy that spiritual transfiguration and harmony generate. These phases readily suggest the three basic stages in the development of the self. birth, growth, and maturity. But they also outline the transcendent possibilities of poetry. The evolution of Champourcin's concept of poetry from spontaneous inspiration to conscious execution and then to a form of communication with God recalls Antonio Machado's poem beginning "Anoche cuando dormia / son ;bendita ilusion... ," with its three images of fountain, beehive, and sun as symbols of the ascending trajectory of faith, life, or the poetic process. For Machado, as well as for Champourcin, the ultimate vision is that of God, but, while her predecessor only sees his "bendita ilusion" in a dream state, Champourcin's relationship is that of direct, devout, and conversational contact. Furthermore, Champourcin goes beyond the implications revealed in her interchanges with the Deity, to discover that ultimately only poetry produces spiritual freedom and transcendence. Despite the multiple functions that poetry fulfilled for her, Champourcin's conscious posture toward her creative process was modest and evasive. Therefore, her changing conception of poetry must be inferred from her poems directly setting forth her poetics rather than from her prose statements. From the very beginning, she refused to theorize about poetry and, upon reflection, she denied it any transcendent purpose. She declined to provide her poetics for Diego's anthology, saying instead "?Mi concepto de la poesia? Carezco en absoluto de conceptos" (Diego 460). She resisted accepting credit or responsibility for her poetic confections, preferring to see herself as the fortunate recipient of poetry's splendid gifts. …

The Politics of Husband-Murder: Gender, Supplementarity and Sacrifice in Lope de Vega's "La reina Juana de Napoles"

Abstract: *St & f +3\ T would surely be an understatement to observe .*n^ tft tthat violent death is far from rare in Spanish A IT c g |Golden Age drama, for the plots of tragic and | L I tragicomic comedias frequently involve one or . X more characters dying at others' hands. Among tf* 1^j>?g * the most famous killers in Golden Age theater, of course, are Calderon's honor-driven, simultaneously pitiable and reprehensible wife-murderers. Far less common in the comedia, unsurprisingly in light of early modem Spanish gender role expectations, are women who kill their husbands. Indeed, when women in the comedia kill under virtually any circumstances, the fundamental varonilidad of homicide makes it a problematic and potentially subversive deed. A woman's murder of her spouse, of the man from whom she derived her social identity and to whom her obedience was demanded by natural, religious, and civil law alike, constituted such a radical act according to conventional ideologies that only the most extreme circumstances could have rendered it even imaginable, let alone palatable or gratifying, to many audience members. This dramatic challenge did not deter Lope de Vega, however, who created in the protagonist of his comedia La reina Juana de Ndpoles a heroic and laudable husband-murderer. This historical Neapolitan queen (Joanna I) leads her ladies-in-

The End of Eréndira's prostitution

Abstract: Ends are ends only when they are not negative but frankly transfigure the events in which they are immanent. (Frank Kermode 175) HE criticism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez' works usually accomplishes the difficult task of considering both his formal innovations and his criticisms of Latin American society and politics, but in the secondary literature on "La increible y triste historia de la candida Erendira y de su abuela desalmada" (1972), the magical, fairy-tale elements have been analyzed much more thoroughly than its main theme of oppressive child prostitution. For example, Joel Hancock discusses "Erendira and the Brothers Grimm" (1978); Barbara B. Aponte examines "el rito de initiation" (1983); Marta Morello-- Frosch analyzes the "funci6n de lo fantAstico" (1984-85); Efren Ortiz gives the story "una lectura mitica" (1980); Antonio Benitez Rojo calls Erendira "la Bella Durn-dente de Garcia Marquez" (1987); Roberto Reis writes that the "estructura de Poder" is questioned through the use of the fantastic (1980); Jasbir Jain calls it "The Reversal of a Fairy Tale" (1987) and Mario Vargas Llosa places his comments on Erendira within a chapter titled the "Hegemonia de lo imaginario" in his 1971 biography of Garcia Marquez, Historic de un deicidio. The social problem that "La increible historic" addresses deserves a more frontal treatment. (I will use this short form of the story title to distinguish it from the film, for which I will use the character's name within quotation marks: "Erendira"). Overlooked in comparison to genre and myth, the story's social themes and realist strategies reveal Garcia Marquez' early interest in criticizing aspects of women's oppression. In this article I first remind readers of the Colombian author's insistence on the autobiographical origins of the Erendira-Abuela pair, and then discuss prostitution in several other texts by him. Finally I seek to explain the controversial ending of "La increible historia" by highlighting its faithfulness to its genesis and analyzing where the fiction diverges both from those origins and from literary norms. My contention is that Erendira!s prostitution is comparable to the massacre of the banana workers in Cien anos de soledad in that they are narrathemes based on real events which are treated by the fictions as unreal. In Cien anos, the historical massacre is represented, but then the sole survivor cannot find anyone to believe his testimony. All deny his tale and declare him mad. Hyperbole and improbability weight the evidence in the fiction in favor of the massive coverup, the Big Lie in which a massacre on such a scale never could have happened. Yet history has witnessed such an event. Similarly, the nature of Erendira's slavery is couched in the language of fable and fairy tale, giving the appearance of fictionality, of its impossibility or untruth in any literal sense. Hyperbole and improbability have led to reader incredulity. Yet Erendira!s barbaric treatment by her grandmother and the huge number of men who have paid-sex with her in fact could happen and does happen in reality. According to published interviews with the author, "La increible historic" is based on an experience when, as a sixteen-year-old, Garcia Marquez saw an eleven-year-old girl working as a prostitute. She was accompanied by a woman whom he presumed to be a relative. At a decisive moment in the fictional Erendira story, the text similarly anchors itself in the reporters look, in personal testimony, rather than the omniscient authority of a storyteller. The episode with the bordello prostitutes is witnessed by a first-person, participant narrator who enters the text on the page before (126), interrupting the third-person omniscient narration. Like Garcia Marquez' newspaper account of seeing the young prostitute abused by a relative, this unnamed participant narrator is a young man. In this segment, a group of sex workers from the local brothel are angry because Erendira has attracted all their customers to wait in lines at her tent. …

Women in the Inquisition. Spain and the New World

Abstract: Women in the Inquisition. Spain and the New World. Ed. Mary E. Giles. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP 1999. ix+402 pages. This book is a welcome addition to a growing list of case studies and interpretations of the Inquisition that in recent years have taken us beyond the trite legends of the past, whether "black" or "pink." As is now customary in this rising interdisciplinary field, the best of the studies contained in Women in the Inquisition (= WI) straddle history and cultural criticism. The authors range from younger scholars to seasoned practitioners in the fields of history, literature, and religious studies. They furnish micro-histories that effectively bring out of neglected archives the daily texture and intimate stories of ordinary people who were brought before Holy Office tribunals to confess perceived offenses against national-Catholic correctness in early modern Spain. The focus on women is especially apt, since the Inquisition's initial preoccupation with detecting relapsed Jewish converts taught its agents and supporters to zero in on matters of the most domestic and private sort: household activities, diet, gestures, clothing-in short, manifestations of what we would now take to be aspects of culturally distinctive performance in the private sphere, an area in which women have traditionally played a leading role. With some notable exceptions, the contributors work on women who were prosecuted by the Inquisition from the late 15th to the 17th centuries. The editor observes that "although the majority of the women portrayed in this collection did not write in the sense of setting pen to paper, the records of their trials constitute a kind of text" (13). This is an important insight and several of the contributors give it varying degrees of attention, but the full implications of the status of inquisitional discourse awaits more sustained analysis. Most of the authors work from manuscript sources, which range broadly from trial documents (full dossiers or pithy summaries) to post-acquittal memoirs. For many of the contributors, the act of writing about women charged or investigated by the Holy Office constitutes a search for authentic women's voices. However, the nature of the trial documents, which were produced by and for the Holy Office, make this heart-felt desire for solidarity with early modern women an elusive goal. The editor groups the fourteen studies that make up the volume under three broad headings: i. The Inquisition and Jewish Converts; 11. The Inquisition and Christian Orthodoxy; and iu. The Inquisition and the New World. This thematic sorting of the material does not quite work as intended, since conversos also figure prominently in Part u. The heading given to Part ii is problematic. The heterodoxy/orthodoxy binary in the context of the Spanish Inquisition carries too much baggage to be useful-shades of Menendez Pelayo here. Heterodoxy itself can refer to a broad class of offenses, some are confessional, but many are socio-cultural in nature. Further diminishing the value of the three rubrics is the complex nature of the cases in Parts ii and III. The study by Mary Elizabeth Perry, which appears in Part u, offers precisely the kind of exemplar we need to rethink the problem of essentialized identities, whether converso, or so-called Old Christian, Morisco, mestizo, African, etc. For it is the hybridity of the cultural scene in Habsburg Spain and its empire that clearly emerges in Perry's portrait of Maria Robles, a Morisca whose sincere but over-the-top Christian piety led to charges that she was an alumbrada. Hers is a heart-wrenching case, since Robles was one of the lucky few among the Moriscos who managed to remain in Spain fifteen years after the decrees of expulsion were issued early in the 17th century. Perry identifies the parallels between Christian alumbrados (many of whom tended to come from converso families) and Muslim Sufis: extravagant expressions of emotion, unmediated contact with the divine, and, most important, "both sects appealed to women, especially those marginalized by poverty and birth" (183). …