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Showing papers in "Hispanic Review in 2003"


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Voice-Overs as discussed by the authors is a collection of essays and reflections by Latin American and U.S. literatures on translation, focusing on the difficulties and under-appreciation of translation, especially with respect to Latin American literature.
Abstract: Voice-Overs: Translation and Latin American Literature. Ed. Daniel Balderston and Marcy E. Schwartz. Albany: SUNY P, 2002. 266 pages.Despite the increase in critical writings on translation in the last twenty-some years, there is still much uncertainty in the profession over what, exactly, translation studies can encompass. Voice-Overs, edited by Daniel Balderston and Marcy Schwartz, goes a long way towards illustrating the potential of studying translation, especially with respect to Latin American literature. As Balderston and Schwartz state in their excellent introduction: "Translation has become both a mechanism and a metaphor for contemporary transnational cultures in the Americas... Translation continues to be one of the main tools, and defining images, of Latin American culture in its relation to world cultures" (1).Voice-Overs is divided into three sections: the first contains essays and reflections by Latin American and U.S. Latino writers; the second by translators; the third by critics. The first section, "Writers on Translation," begins with Borges's "The Homeric Versions" (as translated by Eliot Weinberger). This essay is an especially apt place to start, as nearly every discussion of translation and Latin American literature begins-or ought to begin-with Borges. This section continues with light-toned commentaries by Cortazar and Garcia Marquez on the difficulties and under-appreciation of translation, and continues with the provocative interventions of the Argentine poets Diana Bellessi and Luisa Futoransky, who link translation with considerations of exile, language, and identity. The connections that Bellessi draws between translation and otherness are key here; Bellessi states: "Translation is above all an attempt at alterity" (26). Of related relevance is Rosario Ferre's essay, which focuses on the (un)translatability of cultures. The "Writers on Translation" section also includes texts by the Brazilian Nelida Pinon and by four additional Southern Cone writers: Ariel Dorfman, Cristina Peri Rossi, Tomas Eloy Martinez, and Ricardo Piglia. Here the contributions of Peri Rossi and Piglia stand out.The only major voice probably missing from the first part of Voice-Overs is that of Octavio Paz (sections from "Traduccion: Literatura y literalidad" would have been useful here). On the other hand, the inclusion of texts by U.S. Latino writers Junot Diaz, Cristina Garcia, and Rolando Hinojosa-Smith is a definite strength. An important breakthrough of the anthology, in fact, is the dialogue it establishes between Latin American and U.S. Latino literatures through discussions of translation.The second section of the anthology, "Translating Latin America," contains essays and reflections by some of the leading translators of Latin American literature into English: Margaret Sayers Peden, Gregory Rabassa, Suzanne Jill Levine, James Hoggard, Eliot Weinberger, and John Felstiner. …

21 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Spanish Applied Linguistics at the Turn of the Millennium as discussed by the authors is a collection of papers culled from the 1999 Conference on L1 and L2 Acquisition of Spanish and Portuguese, focusing on morpho-syntax, reading, bilingualism, phonology, and writing.
Abstract: Spanish Applied Linguistics at the Turn of the Millennium. By Ed. Ronald P. Leow and Cristina Sanz. Somerville: Cascadilla, 2000. 234 pages.Spanish Applied Linguistics at the Turn of the Millennium is a collection of papers culled from the 1999 Conference on L1 and L2 Acquisition of Spanish and Portuguese. The volume is divided into five sections: morpho-syntax, reading, bilingualism, phonology, and writing. While the choice of these section headings certainly reflects the eclectic nature of Spanish Applied Linguistics, the volume lacks a strong sense of organization and cohesion. Indeed, the editors make only vague illusions to the threads which hold this collection together, emphasizing breadth over depth, and Minimalism over other strands of inquiry in Second Language Acquisition.The section on morphosyntax offers six papers which examine the acquisition of Spanish as either a first or an additional language. Studies by Camps, Collentine, and Geeslin each address issues of interlanguage development among learners of Spanish as a foreign language. Camps, for example, investigates how the introduction of the imperfect tense might influence the ability of novice learners to produce the forms of the preterit tense accurately in written texts and to use these forms correctly in meaningful written contexts. Collentine compares the abilities of advanced adult learners of Spanish to process verbal morphology and sentence-level syntax. Finally, Geeslin draws on insights from both sociolinguistic and semantic-pragmatic studies of copula choice to examine the acquisition of two constructions (ser + adjective and estar + adjective) by seventy-two learners of high-school age with different levels of expertise in Spanish.Three additional papers in this section take a Minimalist approach to the acquisition of Spanish. In a study of the verb forms produced by four Spanish-speaking monolingual children (16-31 months old), Duran argues that even incipient L1 users show an awareness of functional linguistic categories like person and tense. Liceras, Diaz, and Mongeon compare and contrast the acquisition of null noun constructions and the determiner paradigm by adult L1 and child L2 learners of Spanish. The third article in this section addresses the acquisition of the argument structure of Spanish psychological verbs by learners from different linguistic backgrounds. Here, Montrul asks whether the interlanguage grammars of learners from different linguistic backgrounds (L1 = Turkish, L1 = English) are constrained by UG with respect to the acquisition of verbs like asustar, which subcategorize for two thematic roles: an experiencer and a theme. …

11 citations


Journal ArticleDOI

9 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Menard's Quixote as mentioned in this paper is a fragmentary, incomplete work which coincides-word for word-with Cervantes's and yet is arguably more subtle and infinitely richer.
Abstract: The plot of Jorge Luis Borges's reader-oriented narrative "Pierre Menard, author of Don Quixote" (1939) is well known. An unnamed apologist pens a eulogy of an apocryphal symbolist poet that becomes a catalogue of both his "visible" and his "underground" or "invisible" works. The former consists of 19 entries, including essays, translations, and verse; the latter, "the subterranean, the interminable heroic, the peerless," and the apparent raison d'etre of this pseudo-review, is of course Menard's Quixote, a fragmentary, incomplete work which coincides-word for word-with Cervantes's and yet is arguably more subtle and infinitely richer (Labyrinths 42).1It is easy to see why some of the proponents of the nouvelle critique (Blanchot, Genette), reception theory (Jauss), and other representatives of postmodern philosophy (Deleuze, Danto) have used this short story as the paradigm of a new definition of meaning that is not fixed, ready-made, and author-oriented,2 but transient, ever-changing, and reader-oriented. Within postmodernist thought, reading is no longer a passive undertaking, but an active endeavor that, like writing itself, incorporates its own horizon of expectations to confer alternate and endless meanings on the text: "ambiguity is richness" (Labyrinths 42). This infinite plurality of meanings, of course, would not be possible if the idea of meaning itself had not been infused with the nominalistic or lingualistic ethos of postmodern relativism, according to which meaning cannot be distinguished from the discourse that voices it.It is no wonder that critical readings of "Pierre Menard" as a metaphor of the twofold process of writing/reading have become commonplace, since this short story expresses a core belief of Borges's poetics. Menard's "invisible" masterpiece is only conceivable within a nominalistic, skeptical view of language as an epistemological tool, one of the fundamental presuppositions of Borges's entire literary production, which Jaime Rest, Arturo Echavarria, and lately Silvia Dapia have traced back to the philosophical works of Fritz Mauthner, particularly to his Beitrage zu einer Kritik der Sprache (1901-1902) and his Worterbuch der Philosophie (1910). As they have noted, the most distinctive traits of Mauthner's ideas about language are his nominalism and his epistemological skepticism. For Mauthner, language is merely a social or communal construct based on arbitrary, conventional rules without any transcendence whatsoever. At best, language constitutes a symbolic, mnemonic device that allows its users to collect, organize, and articulate their sensations; otherwise a constant influx of sensorial data would flee the mind leaving no trace, and every sensation would seem a new one. According to Mauthner, however, "knowledge of the world through language is impossible" ("Welterkenntnis [ist] durch die Sprache unmoglich") because that very same metaphorical, approximate, and self-referential nature makes it an unfit epistemological tool (Mauthner, Beitrage I: xi; trans. Weiler 175).It is precisely a nominalistic view of language such as Mauthner's that ultimately accounts for the richness unveiled by Menard's method. For Mauthner, language does not properly belong to the individual, but to the speaking community as a whole; language is a social game in which the context of the speakers plays a pivotal role in the act of communication: "the word is understandable only through the sentence, the sentence only through the situation, the situation only through the whole personality of the speaker, through his whole development" (Mauthner, Beitrage III: 117, trans. Dapia, 1996, 105).3 In sum, language operates like a library of sorts, a vast depository of culture, traditions, and lore, inside which it is difficult for an individual voice to resound fully; in Borges's own words: "Each language is a tradition, each word a shared symbol, and what an innovator can change amounts to a trifle" (Doctor Brodie's Report 11). …

8 citations



Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors argue that the representation of the house, the space of the emerging modern family and microcosm of the State, is equivalent to the individual's representation within the contemporary social reality.
Abstract: Maria de Zayas's popular framed novels have been the object of significant attention in the last few decades. Critics have highlighted the crucial difference in tone between her two collections, namely, Novelas amorosas y ejemplares [Amorous and Exemplary Novels] (1637), and Desenganos amorosos [The Disenchantmenls of Love] (1647), especially regarding the metaphor of the house. According to Amy Williamsen, while "in Novelas Amorosas Zayas explores the comic possibilities of this architectural sign, at times demonstrating that the rigid imposition of patriarchal order also restricts men . . . Desenganos, on the other hand, portrays the house as an instrument of torture employed against women" (646). Rather than viewing the house as metafiction of the struggle for female authorship, I purport to formulate the house in terms of the mapping of social relations.1 I propose that the representation of the house, space of the emerging modern family and microcosm of the State, is equivalent to the individual's representation within the contemporary social reality.I will read the house, the "architecture of patriarchy" (Williamsen 646), within the larger context of the cartographic efforts of the seventeenth century, to concentrate later on the Spanish house endorsed by the Christian treatises for women. Regarding the house, women's private life, as part of the public sphere-the larger social context-allows for the conceptualization of the space of the family and of woman's development. This is necessary, according to Capel and Ortega, if we are to analyze feminine experience in a pre-industrial society, and I would add, if we are to historicize the concept of patriarchy in the particular scenario of seventeenth-century Spain.Moreover, I believe that Zayas's work makes it apparent that defining "woman-as-housed" (337), in Mark Wigley's words, is a cartographic exercise that maps the woman's body, and that defines propriety at the same time it maps the identity of the emerging nation-state.2 The constant emphasis on the house and the family in Zayas's stories is thus a necessary reference to women's social positioning and identity amidst changing times. Therefore it may be that the difference underlying the ten years distance between the two volumes underscores Zayas's views on the progressive artificiality of systems of social and generic control such as that of the house.The renewed interest in space by postmodern social and architectural theorists, as well as by contemporary feminists and geographers, is due to the fact that it reveals more about power relations than time or history, concepts that were the focus of sociological studies until the seventies (Soja 4-6). It has become apparent that the interrelation between space and the social or generic identity, what Edward Soja names "the spatiality of social life" (44), is never innocent since class, gender, and race are inscribed everywhere as spatial metaphors. Contemporary feminists propose, moreover, that knowledge itself is embodied, so to speak, it is engendered and embedded in the material context of place (Duncan 1). However, space also affects the way gender is constructed and understood to the point that spatiality and identity can he regarded as interrelated (Massey 179). Consequently, if we think that, contrary to time, the idea of space is encoded as feminine, then we will agree with Doreen Massey that the exercise of rescuing it from passivity, stasis, and depoliticization, connects with the philosophical debate regarding the construction of the dichotomies of gender relations (6-7). In other words, questioning the way space is conceptualized implies challenging the definitions and borders characteristic of a masculinist episternology. Particularly, architecture's interrogation of the house and its implications may contribute to the understanding of what Massey refers to as the "power geometry" (265), that is, the inscription of power in the intricate map of social relations. …

7 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Pardo formularia una tesis en la tertulia de la duquesa de Sahagun y, como parece indicar el titulo, la acci6n subsiguiente se encarga de probar su validez as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: ? ,fi t ; * prematrimonial con Diego Pacheco, un senorito A "Y [l andaluz al que apenas acaba de conocer, supone -|. ~ j i? T un reto a la moral de la epoca que ha venido ' ~,4-rSu T Iintrigando a los lectores de Insolacion desde el l ~* {~ ~J*-'momento mismo en que se public6 la novela en 1889. Hasta hace un par de decadas, como en una especie de "affaire Dreyfus" de poca monta que se volviera contra el autor del "Yo acuso," la inmensa mayoria de los criticos responsabilizaba al naturalismo de la obra (o a su determinismo) del traspies de la arist6crata gallega: seguin eso, Gabriel Pardo formularia una tesis en la tertulia de la duquesa de Sahagun y, como parece indicar el titulo, la acci6n subsiguiente se encarga de probar su validez. En los ultimos veinte afios, sin embargo, esta lectura tradicional ha sufrido una revisi6n radical y ha sido sustituida por otra mas relacionada con

6 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Xavier's letters reveal as much about mid-sixteenth-century Europe, in the throes of religious reformation and imperialist expansion, as about Japan itself as mentioned in this paper, comparable in its simplicity to the spontaneous style of Teresa de Jesus, albeit more imperfect than hers because of his long absence from Spain.
Abstract: On August 15, 1549, Francisco Xavier, along with two other Spanish Jesuits, three Japanese converts, and two servants, arrived in the harbor of Kagoshima on the Japanese island of Kyushu. Thus, he launched a brief period of missionary activity that climaxed in 1597 with the crucifixion of six Spanish Franciscans and twenty Japanese Christians, and ended in the early seventeenth century with the expulsion of all foreign missionaries and the closure of Japan to the West. Xavier, revered in western Christendom as the "Apostle of the Indies and Japan," was one of the first European observers of Japanese life.1 In a series of letters to his co-religionists in India and Europe he recounts his journey to Japan, providing the early modern West with a window onto Marco Polo's fabled Zipangu while documenting for posterity the process through which Europe gradually asserted itself over the non-European world. In fact these letters reveal as much about mid-sixteenth-century Europe, in the throes of religious reformation and imperialist expansion, as about Japan itself. Yet they are also a kind of autobiography in which Xavier not only chronicles his extraordinary experiences but attempts to fashion a personal identity through and in opposition to what in subsequent Western discourse would become the very limit-both geographical and conceptual-of the Orient.In his letters Xavier balances his discussion of Christianity by presenting the theological questions and doubts raised by his Japanese audiences. However, he denounces Buddhist monasticism with a zealousness exceptional even in a churchman of the Counter Reformation. In his judgment the bonzes (Buddhist monks) are avaricious, parasitical, and hypocritical. What is more, they are sexually profligate: some have relations with nuns, who regularly induce abortions, and most are practicing sodomites. Yet even though Xavier inveighs against Japanese religion and morality, he expresses great admiration for the Japanese people as a whole, enthusiastically declaring that they are "la mejor que hasta aguora esta descubierta."2 Xavier claims the Japanese exceed all non-Europeans through their goodness, honor, and politeness, and also because they are a "gemte bramqua" [white people] (letter 96, 277) and as such naturally pre-disposed to Christian conversion.3 By defining the Japanese as inherently superior, he implicitly establishes himself, and by extension Europe, as the ultimate arbiter of human worth. But in so doing he also validates indigenous Japanese culture, which for the most part remained intact despite his dreams of conversion and the economic and military designs of the West until well into the nineteenth century.Xavier was a prodigious traveler, even for his age, but not a prolific writer. Born in 1506 in what was then a Basque-speaking region of Navarre,4 he journeyed across Europe to Paris, where he studied theology with Inigo de Loyola; then to Rome to participate in the foundation of the Jesuit order; and finally to Lisbon, to spearhead the Portuguese evangelization of the East Indies. From there, he made his way as a missionary to Africa, India, the Spice Islands, and Japan, reaching the easternmost point of his peregrinations at the Japanese imperial capital of Kyo to. While in Japan, he wrote five letters in which he detailed his experiences and comments on Japanese life. Although the letters were addressed to the Portuguese mission in Goa, India, they were written mostly in Spanish, probably because Xavier's secretary at the time knew only that language.5 Several more letters dating from before and after Xavier's Japanese sojourn also contain important information about Japan. They were written in either Spanish or Portuguese.6 A total of 137 letters still remain from Xavier's entire correspondence. This constitutes his literary legacy, though according to Ignacio Elizalde, Xavier possibly composed several poems and dramas.7 As Elizalde further demonstrates, Xavier wrote in a plain, unadorned Spanish, comparable in its simplicity to the spontaneous style of Teresa de Jesus, albeit even more imperfect than hers because of his long absence from Spain and his constant exposure to other languages (47-48). …

6 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Borges as mentioned in this paper describes a case in which a condemned man in Lyon who is scheduled to die by the guillotine was commuted just before the appointed moment and later reduced to four years in a Siberian prison.
Abstract: IN the Western tradition of storytelling, time is as much a mystery as a revelation. Willingly or not, author and reader confront it. It is the writer's, the artist's, and the musician's indispensable abstraction, a recurrent measurement or focal point in their imagination. And the imagination in its basic, creative function manipulates, expands, or (in the Eastern tradition) eliminates time at will. In that enigmatic process human drives that are either difficult or impossible to control-love, hate, dreams, hope, ecstasy, sorrow-become the mind's vital accomplices. Time, in the spirit of Borges, is inevitably our plaything. An exploration of the mysteries of clock, calendar, heritage, and future await the reader in the most revealing episodes of Don Quijote (for example, in the Cave of Montesinos and in the Duke's and Duchess's palace); in the amnesia epidemic and the extended existences of people and things in Cien anos de soledad; in Dostoevsky's deepest thoughts on the perception of death in life in several of his novels; in the ambiguous circumstances of Borges's stories; and in H.G. Wells's The Time Machine, a fantasy in which the Time Traveller describes his view of the world in the year 802,701 A.D. Early in Part I of The Idiot, Prince Lev Nikolayevich Myshkin comments on the intensity and fullness of time experienced by a condemned man in Lyon who is scheduled to die by the guillotine a few minutes later. In his story "El milagro secreto," and in characteristically circuitous detail, Jorge Luis Borges creates a representative yet unique protagonist who through his circumstances is analogous to the figure mentioned by Prince Myshkin. Jaromir Hladik is a Jewish writer in Prague who is arrested in his apartment by the German Gestapo on March 19, 1939, and imprisoned. Ten days later, he is executed by a firing squad. Is Borges with Hladik taking up where Dostoevsky left off? Whether or not he had the Russian's text in mind, he clearly shared his curiosity over the mental effects of imminent death and came upon the imaginary event he needed as a literary counteraction to one of the terrifying realities of Nazi power before and during World War II. With Borges's timely encouragement, God grants Hladik's special request: a year's writing time to complete his unfinished play, Los enemigos, before the fusillade that will wipe him out within two minutes of that psychologically agitated yet intellectually serene prayer. Singular as it was, Hladik's experience had important antecedents. Two of them are executions referred to in The Idiot. As is well known, Fyodor Dostoyevsky-then a political dissident in his twenties-was escorted to a scaffold in St. Petersburg for his own execution on December 22, 1849; but the sentence was commuted just before the appointed moment and later reduced to four years in a Siberian prison. So the author knew what he and Prince Myshkin were talking about. His reference to the execution in Lyon reflects his commitment to social justice. Dostoevsky's fascination with individual human depravities did not deter him from denouncing institutionalized capital punishment as the worst of crimes. The Prince declares: "To kill for murder is an immeasurably greater evil than the crime itself. Judicial murder is immeasurably more horrible than one committed by a robber" (23). But judicial murder is also appropriate food for narrative thought (as in three of the best known Hispanic-American novels: Garcia Marquez's El general en su laberinto, Carpentier's El recurso del metodo, and Asturias's El senor Presidente); and, further on in The Idiot, Dostoevsky tells of a case in which a Borgesian kind of motif is clearly discernible. Keeping in mind Jaromir Hladik's postponable death, we hear Myshkin again during his first visit with the Yepanchin family. The episode he recalls this time-that of a 27-year-old prisoner who is reprieved minutes before his scheduled execution-is the author's reliving of his own traumatic experience (and at the same age) in St. …

5 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The Carajicomedia is more than an erotic or obscene work; it is carefree, playful, burlesque, and above all meant to mock and corrode official idealism and its language as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: IN 1511 Hernando del Castillo, a Castilian working in Valencia in the service of the Count of Oliva, published what has become the famous Cancion.ero General. This large collection of poems, gathered by Castillo over twenty years, was arranged into nine sections, the last being a collection of burlesque poems called Obras de burlas provocantes a risas. The final section was republished separately in Valencia in 1519, with the addition of a new work entitled Carajicomedia. It was the first and the last time that the Carajicomedia saw the printing press in over three hundred years, until Luis Usoz y Rios found the only known copy of the 1519 edition at the British Museum and published it in 1840-1843 (Cancionero de Obras de Burlas Provocantes a Risa). However, the Usoz edition was very limited and it too became very rare; for all purposes we could say that the Carajicomedia, which first saw light in 1519, was not made available again until 1974 (Pablo Jauralde Pou and Juan Alfredo Bellon Cazabdn). Jose Maria Diez Borque included it in his 1977 work on Spanish erotic poetry, and three more editions of the work have since appeared, edited by Frank Dominguez (1978), Carlos Varo (1981), and Alvaro Alonso (1995). The rarity of the work is reflected in the scarcity of assessments and interpretations-very little has been written about the Carajicomedia.1 Usoz, who found the work in London, was a Spaniard who had become a Quaker and published other works by writers whom he considered Spanish religious reformers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. He disliked the Catholic hierarchy and the Catholic faith intensely, and felt a Protestant Reformation would have cured the evils of the nation-evils that he believed were still alive and well in his lifetime. It was the elites, he maintained, who were the cause of the corruption and the vices of Spaniards; Spain was not the country of the mystical religion propounded by established propaganda, but the country of the obscenities that the Carajicomedia presented. He believed that the book had been written by a priest. While Usoz was a liberal who defended the bourgeois freedoms and rights-things he did not see in Spain-he was also a nineteenthcentury Puritan who condemned all that he thought the Carajicomedia stood for. He apparently saw nothing particularly revolutionary in the work- he seems rather to have published it as an example of the general depravity of the time, modestly abbreviating the "obscene" word in the title and every subsequent reference to Carajo (penis) to "C ." Today we can view the work free of Usoz's personal opinions. The Carajicomedia is more than an erotic or obscene work; it is carefree, playful, burlesque, and above all meant to mock and corrode official idealism and its language. Several modern readers do not see these subversive elements, although some of them do offer interesting observations. To Antonio Rodriguez-Monino (Cancionero General 1958), for example, it seems inconceivable that a work such as Carajicomedia could have been published in the early sixteenth century; he calls it merely an obscene book, and notes that it was never included in the subsequent editions of the Cancionero General. Pablo Jauralde Pou and Juan Alfredo Bellon Cazaban suggest that the Obras de burlas section that once contained it offers us a picture of fifteenth-century social conflicts, still simmering in the early sixteenth century. Jose Maria Diez Borque writes that the poems in his anthology (which includes the Carajicomedia) celebrate the raw pleasure of sex devoid of all guilt, and Frank Dominguez states that the poetry in the Obras de burlas is full of vitality, expressed in a language completely opposed to the conventional one. For him the Carajicomedia is also misogynist, as it portrays women as ugly and carnal and as desiring nothing more from men than their sexual services. However, I maintain that the Carajicomedia may take the opposite side, and may actually convey feminist attitudes: the women discard official male idealism in all its forms. …

4 citations



Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors of the first volume, Novelas amorosas y ejemplares, discuss the role of women in the representation of discourse in the work of a female author.
Abstract: As the critical anthology edited by Amy Williamsen and Judith Whitenack, The Dynamics of Discourse, and other recent publications have clearly established for Zayas scholarship, one of the most crucial problems addressed in her novela collections is the function of discourse itself in the work of the female author.1 Beginning with the paratextual materials with which she presents both volumes to her reading public, followed by her creation of the frame narrative's literary sarao, and in the repeated telling of their own and others' tales by sarao participants, we find that Zayas focuses our attention on the exercise of discursive agency by female voices. Mirroring her authorial stance, the female frame and novela characters work to present their stories to a demanding audience and, by so doing, attempt to establish themselves as active subjects in a competitive artistic milieu. In their studies of various novelas, critics have shown that the representation of female discourse in Zayas's works involves the appropriation of discursive models from the masculine world of letters and the performative reworking of them. Her narratives question the logic of these models, often placing them in the service of alternative, unexpected ends, and in the process they ironize the disparity between the social principles and the practices such models support. The "project of self-authorization" undertaken by Zayas and her female narrators confirms Susan Lanser's argument that "female voice ... is a site of ideological tension made visible in textual practices" (6-7), for we find in the novela collections a poetics whose narrative structures as well as ideas substantially alter models appropriated from the masculine realm of letters.2In this essay, I would like to revisit the relationship between Maria de Zayas's own successful, self-reflective discursive function in the first volume, Novelas amorosas y ejemplares, as a published female writer who directs her words to a potentially censorial, male-dominated public of literati and the apparently frustrated discursive function of the female frame tale protagonist, Lisis. While the late Ruth Anthony El Saffar and others have seen in Lisis's troubled love life a reflection of the personal experiences of or known to Zayas, less attention has been given to the common discursive function of the author and her frame protagonist, particularly in the first novelets volume, where the latter is generally viewed as suffering from an illness-induced passivity.3 Although the development of Lisis's voice is chronicled in the narrative as a troubled, often challenged process, this character mirrors specifically the authorial function of Zayas in her mimetic bid for discursive authority before an academy-like public whose male members are empowered to judge and to respond to her communications. This essay will focus on the ways that both Zayas's and her heroine's voice represent the author's concern that women learn to control their position, vis-a-vis their audience, by exercising deliberate choice in the "place" from which they speak or write.The represented context or "place" of discourse is deliberately foregrounded in Zayas's own paratextual framing of the Novelas amorosas y ejemplares, in which the author frustrates readers by leaving no biographical trail to suggest how experience might have shaped her art. I suggest that Zayas carefully censors personal information, in order to establish her identity through the act of writing itself. In contrast, for example, to Cervantes's autobiographical references to his military service and physical injury in his Novelas prologue, in "Al que leyere" Zayas articulates herself solely from an imaginary space delineated as the public sphere by her discursive present tense, omitting any allusion to family and her personal past.4 The author's decision to found her identity within this public domain of print culture, through a published literary work that had attributed economic value in its own right, stands in marked contrast to the places from which her characters are made to tell their stories in the frame narrative. …

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Marcela's behavior, as might be expected, is considered unnatural as mentioned in this paper, and she is sharply criticized by the other shepherds who characterize her as "cruel," "arrogante," and "desdenosa" (195).
Abstract: Cervantes's Don Quijote and the characters within it owe their existence to the curious interplay of art and life that has come to epitomize the modern era. The novel is a text born of other texts, within which texts play an essential role in narrative structure, story, plot, and character development. Throughout Cervantes's novel, it is blatantly obvious that the text and all its characters are conceived, nurtured, and sustained by a fascinating and intriguing combination of inter- and intratextuality. Take, for instance, Cervantes's efforts to distance himself from his protagonist and present him as an autonomous character ("aunque parezco padre, soy padrastro de don Quijote" [79]); don Quijote's countless sleepless nights reading "libros de caballeria con tanta aficion y gusto" (98); the creation of the narrator Cide Hamete Benengeli; the scrutiny of Quijote's library by the priest and the barber, the series of interpolated tales; and the incorporation of other novels and genres (e.g. El curioso impertinente and Maese Perez's puppet theatre).It is probably safe to say that of all the interpolated tales in Don Quijote, the episode of Grisostomo and Marcela (I: 11-14) has received the most critical attention. No doubt this is due in large part to the extent to which the shepherdess Marcela's character embodies a strong sense of individualism, a feature that sets her apart from the other female characters in Cervantes's novel and in other works of the same period. In the words of Elvira Macht de Vera, "Marcela se transmuta en una libertad autosuficiente y se plantea problematica en el mundo de los seres corrientes y de sus actos cotidianos" (6). Curiously, though not surprisingly, what sets Marcela apart from other female characters makes her more like Don Quijote. Marcela is the one character who most closely mirrors the novel's strong-minded and free-willed protagonist. To quote Julio Rodriguez Puertolas: "Don Quijote descubre [en Marcela], sin duda con admiracion, la existencia de otra persona tan independiente y libre como el mismo, integerrima e individualista, sincera y honesta. Don Quijote descubre un espejo en que puede mirar un otro yo" (185). Like Don Quijote, Marcela confuses art and life and is driven by an innate desire to alter reality in order to achieve her personal objective. Like the idealistic knight, she is also deaf to those who offer her practical advice in an attempt to thwart her efforts. Marcela's behavior, as might be expected, is considered unnatural. She is sharply criticized by the other shepherds who characterize her as "cruel," "arrogante," and "desdenosa" (195). As a female character in the pastoral genre, what Yvonne Jehenson has called a "male fantasy, a microcosmic image of man's gender-inflected wish fulfillment" (19), Marcela is atypical because she does not conform to the traditional image of woman as the object of male desire.That Marcela is misunderstood by her fellow shepherds may be dismissed by the fact that they are victims of their textual and contextual circumstances. Less understandable, however, are a variety of critical studies that regard her as callous, cold-hearted, destructively selfish, and categorically out-of-character (see, for example, Herrero, Dunn, and McGaha, among others). For every study that has concluded that Marcela's character is "awkward," "humorous," and not "fully believable" (Finello 123), there is a more recent one that has defended her as a woman who actively resists objectification and inscription as the helpless female. These studies view Marcela as the embodiment of the "ideals of female liberty" (Laffey 553) and the subversion of "the male view of her as textual object" (Jehenson 29), a character willing to proclaim female subjectivity and establish her autonomy regardless of the consequences and in spite of how difficult it is for the characters within the novel and her would-be critics to accept her (El Saffar 159).Marcela's character has generated diametrically opposing critical views, which, as Ruth El Saffar has pointed out, divide "fascinatingly along gender lines" (158). …


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TL;DR: The modelo garcilasista, de Gimenez Caballero et al. as mentioned in this paper, is an elaboration of the estetica fascista en la preguerra.
Abstract: Introduccion. Primera parte: La elaboracion de la estetica fascista en la preguerra. 1. Arte y Estado, de Gimenez Caballero. 2. El modelo garcilasista. Segunda parte: La estetica fascista en la posguerra: Escorial. 3. El proyecto para la unidad de los valores esteticos (1940-1942). 4. La destruccion de la unidad. Tercera parte: La recuperacion de la modernidad literaria. 5. El modelo romantico. 6. Hacia la poesia pura.

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TL;DR: The contenido de this libro es el resultado del interes por un sector de la literatura espanola, que influenciado por ciertos escritores belgas muestra una obsesion por las ciudades decrepitas, de esplendido pasado and presente mortecino, asi como la creacion de una imagen de Espana, asumida luego como propia y afirmada in obras literarias and pictoricas
Abstract: El contenido de este libro es el resultado del interes por un sector de la literatura espanola, que influenciado por ciertos escritores belgas muestra una obsesion por las ciudades decrepitas, de esplendido pasado y presente mortecino, asi como la creacion de una imagen de Espana, asumida luego como propia y afirmada en obras literarias y pictoricas de Regoyos, Zuloaga, o Jose Gutierrez-Solana, entre otros.




Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, the authors present an overview of the history of Galicia in the lifetime of Emilia Pardo Bazan and the war of 1898, including the preludios de una "Insolacion" (entre junio de 1887 and marzo de 1889).
Abstract: 1. Genre and uncertainty in "La Dama Joven" 2. Los personajes secundarios de "Nazarin" 3. La recepcion de "Pequeneces" del Padre Luis Coloma 4. Ciclo Adan y Eva - la autobiografia de don Benicio Neira en version de Emilia Pardo Bazan 5. Unas cartas de Emilia Pardo Bazan a Benito Perez Galdos 6. "P.A." and P.B. ("Penas arriba" and Pardo Bazan" looking for scapegoats - Pardo Bazan and the war of 1898 7. Emilia Pardo Bazan: los preludios de una "Insolacion" (entre junio de 1887 y marzo de 1889) 8. Galicia in English books on Spain in the lifetime of Emilia Pardo Bazan 9. From Realism to Modernism in Spanish fiction 10. Sentimental battles - an introduction to the works of Alberto Insua 11. The "history" of Jose Maria Fajardo in the fourth series of Galdos's "Episdios Nacionales" 12. Boundaries and black holes - the physics and personality and representation in Unamuno 13. Religion in Galdos's "Miau"

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TL;DR: El pero del hortelano as mentioned in this paper is a play about the process of discovery and discovery topos, and it is interpreted as a work which confronts the contradictions of the Baroque code of honor, and the audience members are called upon to be accessories to the maintenance of "el secreto de Teodoro".
Abstract: MOSTLY interpreted as a work which confronts the contradictions of the Baroque code of honor, El pero del hortelano is also a play about the process of discovery.1 Indeed, the theme of discovery runs through the argument and, as will be seen below, associates the play's structure and layers of meaning. The multiple aspects of the discovery topos help organize the play from its beginning, when the Countess of Belflor, Diana, searches in the dark for the intruders who have dared to enter her chambers.2 More importantly, issues related to the revelation of secrets also implicate the audience members who, at the play's end, are called upon to be accessories to the maintenance of "el secreto de Teodoro."3 From beginning to end, then, El perro foregrounds anagnorisis in its Aristotelian dimension, especially stressing the welcome transition between ignorance and knowledge.4 There is, however, not a unified process of discovery concerning a single protagonist. Diana, Teodoro, Tristan, and Ludovico all deploy various strategies to uncover or discover the world of the other and of the self at various stages of the play. These "discoveries" ultimately lead to the harmonious resolution of the conflict presented. Discovery and knowledge, then, act as a means to overcoming the constraints of a code of honor that stifles the developing passion of Diana and her secretary, Teodoro. But, as will be shown in this article, to discover and to uncover, in this case, do not lead to the vindication of either truth or reality. Although discovery, in the sense of recognition and access to knowledge, is important in El perro, other aspects of this process are equally central to the play. Discovery in El perro is extended to embrace also the recognition both of oneself and of the role and situation of others. It is, consequently, interesting to note that probably the more important discovery of the play is the result of Tristan's invention of Teodoro's wealthy parentage. Along the way to this fabrication and Ludovico's anagnorisis, however, some important sacrifices are made. The more prominent of these are, for a contemporary audience, Marcela's feelings and future. Sacrifices are also made on the moral level, where truth is the first and the last victim of the play's "happy" discoveries. Nevertheless, in spite of these sacrifices, as Pilar Mud's recent rendition of the play shows, a director can manage to keep the audience's sympathy with its main protagonists.5 Although switching our allegiance from Marcela!s plight to Diana's and Teodoro's confusing relationship, a skdful director may have viewers endorse and even enjoy the play's denouement. Suitably for a play dealing with discovery, recognition, and deception both within the play and between the play and its audience, the initial scene reveals that appearances are not what they seem. When searching for those intruders whose presence within her chambers threatens to undermine her reputation, Diana stresses the dimensions of her deception. Using her own sense of vision as a way of describing the access to knowledge, she informs her servants that the scene is not the product of her own imagination. She then insists and qualifies her assertion that she has not been a victim of Baroque "desengano" and has seen neither a dream nor a shadow: "no es sombra lo que vi, / ni sumo que me ha burlado" (11-12). Diana is determined to find out the identity of the men who use their own capes to disguise themselves. Quite like Don Juan, who will use Mota's cape to try to usurp his place in Dona Ana's bed, these men depart from a possible scene of seduction covering themselves with a cape. Both a sign of their class and an indicator of their masculinity, the cape also underscores their deceitfulness.6 Not only do Teodoro and his servant run away under cover of darkness but they "kill" the light on their way in a scene which is echoed in Don Juan's seduction of Isabella in the palace.7 The "sombrero" that is used to suffocate the torch will, Diana believes, provide a clue to the discovery of the intruders' secret identity: "yo sabre quien es. …



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TL;DR: Ferri Coll as mentioned in this paper presenta un estudio de poesia atendiendo al contexto en que se creo, con la intencion de que el lector advierta la importancia tanto de la palabra alli dicha como del ambiente que la propicio.
Abstract: Las academias literarias del Siglo de Oro fueron el escaparate en que se mostraron las diferentes tendencias poeticas del momento. Constituyeron un pequeno mundo que reproducia en lo literario los topicos y las modas de la epoca, mientras que en lo social se mostraban deudoras del ideario monarquico de los Austrias. Los nocturnos valencianos son el ejemplo mejor documentado que poseemos hasta el momento. Este libro presenta un estudio de su poesia atendiendo al contexto en que se creo, con la intencion de que el lector advierta la importancia tanto de la palabra alli dicha como del ambiente que la propicio. Jose Maria Ferri Coll es doctor en Filologia Hispanica por la Universidad de Alicante, donde ejerce como profesor. Ha dedicado una monografia al tema de las ruinas en la poesia aurea y varios articulos a la literatura del Siglo de Oro.

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TL;DR: The obra poetica mas compleja y contradictoria de la poesia espaiola del siglo xx. as discussed by the authors, e.g., "Guerra en España" (1985), is a fragment of a collection of poems written by Juan Ram6n Jimenez.
Abstract: uizas no haya otra figura en la historia de la li*1; *r+tf ^ teratura espafiola contemporanea que haya suA!:|^j y ffrido tantos encasillamientos empobrecedores *I ^y Vw como la de Juan Ram6n Jimenez. Algunos menos * y^ r ^ * justificados que otros, pero todos igualmente e*(ftJ;*^ reveladores de una imagen simplificada de lo que seguramente es la obra poetica mas compleja y contradictoria de la poesia espaiola del siglo xx. Junto a otros muchos motivos, parte de esa visi6n simplificada y empobrecida se debe quizas a un hecho insolito pero cierto. A estas alturas todavia hay una parte considerable de la obra juanramoniana que resulta desconocida para los lectores. Son bastantes los textos y proyectos de libros-sobre todo de prosa-que permanecen ineditos. Desde hace afos se viene reclamando una urgente y rigurosa labor de critica textual que ponga orden en el complejo mundo de las ediciones juanramonianas. Afortunadamente varios especialistas en su obra trabajan desde hace tiempo en esta direcci6n, sacando a la luz proyectos de libros que el autor dej6 sin publicar a su muerte, y que una y otra vez nos sorprenden al mostramos a un Juan Ram6n desconocido e inedito. Si la reconstrucci6n y publicaci6n de libros como Guerra en Espana (1985) han contribuido a romper con el mito de un Juan Ram6n torremarfilefio, ajeno a la problematica politica y social de su pais, ahora la pr6xima publicaci6n de un libro

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TL;DR: In this paper, Johnson explores the relations between Cervantes's writings and the historical conditions that account for their creation and find representation, directly or obliquely, in their specific fictional forms, and argues that Ricote, his professional success as shopkeeper, his accumulated wealth, his emigration, his pessimistic attitudes toward racially mixed marriages, and his efforts at money smuggling are all parts in an accurate representation of the real experience of the contemporary moriscos.
Abstract: QUIXOTIC MATERIALISM: AN ECONOMIC REPROCESSING OF CERVANTES'S IMAGINED WORLDS (A REVIEW ARTICLE)In the seven essays included in Cervantes and the Material World (Urbana: University of Illinois Press), Carroll B. Johnson explores the relations between Cervantes's writings and the historical conditions that account for their creation and find representation, directly or obliquely, in their specific fictional forms. He proposes, for example, that Rinconete y Cortadillo's comic underworld of criminals, stylized violence, and bizarre ceremonies and initiations should be seen as representing critically the corrupt practices in the commercial monopoly exercised by Sevilla in Spain's thriving overseas trade network. A key to the establishment of this link lies in the various suggestions that Johnson finds in the name of the ringleader of the thieves, Monipodio, who might in fact represent a major profiteer in the system, the Duke of Medina Sidonia. Turning to the Quixote, Johnson reminds us that the character Ricote, his professional success as shopkeeper, his accumulated wealth, his emigration, his pessimistic attitudes toward racially mixed marriages, and his efforts at money smuggling are all parts in an accurate representation of the real experience of the contemporary moriscos; that the character's name itself-evoking, on the one hand, the Valle de Ricote, a region known for its industrious moriscos and their expulsion, on the other hand, vast accumulations of wealth-points directly to two of the fundamental issues of the controversies that preceded the exile of the unfortunate minority-labor and hoarding; and that Augsburg, the site of Ricotes's respite in his wanderings through Germany, was a historical center of international banking, and as such provides a crucial allusion to the two themes informing the whole narrative, money and religion. When Johnson goes beyond such straightforward matters of loose documentation to more comprehensive interpretations of specific literary worlds, his arguments can become quite elusive and his conclusions more difficult to accept. As a "paradigmatic figure," Ricote expands enormously. "Through him is enacted in miniature and at the personal level, the classic trajectory of Spanish capital in the sixteenth century: from the mines of America, through Spain, to the waiting coffers of foreign bankers." The obscurity thickens in a contorted and elliptical argument to show that the "prognosis" for the married life of his beautiful daughter, Ana Felix, and the dashing youth, Don Gregorio, an old Christian who shares her ordeals in the treacherous world of Algiers, is "not good." A cryptic pronouncement crowns the complexities of the interpretation, but it does little to bring clarity: Johnson claims that, in concluding with a conflict between ideology and business (he describes the facilitator of the deliverance of Ricote's family, Don Antonio Moreno, as "a prototypical Catalan businessman") rather than between ideology and young love, the story "validates the currently discredited relationship between base and superstructure so central to classical Marxist analysis," and that, by pointing this out, he himself risks "falling out of favor with the guardians of the Reagan-Bush-Clinton new world order." Whoever the latter might be, one surely hopes that they have other more important things on which to focus their worries and favors. Such "relevant asides" are frequent and create a distracting counterpoint of political opinion running through the book. While vigorously calling for an historicizing rather than a "timeless" or a "universalist" approach to Cervantes's fiction, Johnson can be anything but rigorous when interpreting Cervantes's world through identifications with contemporary history ("the analogies with our own situation are so precise and so compelling on so many occasions- juros and tax-free munis, for example-that they cry out to be made explicit" [p. 200].) We are told that the argument of Don Quixote, Juan Haldudo, and the unfortunate Andres is the first labor-management debate in history, that the economically debilitating censeo is comparable to the "funny money" of the Reagan period in American economic history, that the economic collapse of Spain in the 1590's resembles that of America in the 1990's, and that governor Sancho's efforts to deal with the poverty of Barataria are superior in their humanitarianism and lack of phoniness to "what we now call welfare 'reform' and surround with a rhetoric of morality and family values in late-twentiethcentury America. …