Showing papers in "Hispanic Review in 2006"

Writing for the Eyes in the Spanish Golden Age (review)

Abstract: DE ARMAS, FREDRICK A., ED. Writing for the Eyes in the Spanish Golden Age. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 2004. 310 pages.Writing for the Eyes in the Spanish Golden Age offers an impressive rethinking of the mutually illuminating media of text and image in Golden Age Spain, of the integral relationship between the verbal and the visual. Painting was clearly central to Golden Age writers, just as writing was a key context for artists of the period. To make this point, Frederick de Armas introduces this group of essays by observing that as the blind Homer could visualize and represent vividly intricate objects, so too Raphael in his Parnassus can paint art that he has never seen because of his reliance on verbal description.Professor de Armas opens "The Painter and the Writer are One and the Same," the first of four units in this collection, with his essay entitled "(Mis)placing the Muse," offering a reading of Cervantes's Galatea from the perspective of the visual, pointing out that the entire work is framed by frescoes: Book 1 offers an ecphrastic presentation of Raphael's Galatea, and Book VI a description based on Raphael's Parnassus. Both artists, likewise, focus on the Muse of epic poetry, Calliope. De Armas's analysis illuminates the reason why Calliope is misplaced (present where Thalia would seem more relevant) as a means by which Cervantes boldly figures himself as the Spanish Virgil (38).Eric Graf's "The Pomegranate of Don Quixote I, 9" provides an original exploration of the political and religious significance of the pomegranate in the transition between chapters 8 and 9, the encounter between Don Quijote and the Basque. Explaining the significance of the granada/pomegranate, Graf argues that "the geopolitical pomegranate at the beginning of chapter 9 is but one of a cluster of details that converge to indicate that Cervantes's principal concern while writing Don Quijote was the Morisco question" (51).The next essay, "The Quixotic Art: Cervantes, Vasari, and Michelangelo" by Christopher Weimer, is a provocative piece that acknowledges Cervantes as a reader of Vasari. Reminding us that Don Quijote himself acknowledges the need for a knight to follow the painter's example" (72), Weimer then presents Don Quijote as "a parody of a Renaissance painter," offering numerous parallels between his life and the life of Michelangelo.The second section of the book, entitled "Ut pictura poesis," addresses the extensive mutual influence of Golden Age poetry and prose, beginning with Maria Cristina Quintero's contribution, entitled "Writing Desire in Early Modem Spanish Poetry: Some Lessons from Painting." This intriguing essay begins with a consideration of the female body in Renaissance visual and verbal examples, especially ones in which a woman looks at herself in a mirror: Rubens's Venus Looking in a Mirror, Titian's Venus at Her Toilet, and Velazquez's Venus and Cupid. Texts by Gongora, Quevedo, and Zayas are also analyzed, revealing that in male-generated texts "the women are merely the pretext for the opportunistic exhibitionism of an implied male subject" (195).Mary Barnard's "Inscribing Transgression, Siting Identity: Arguijo's Phaeton and Ganymede in Painting and Text" considers the case of Juan de Arguijo, a poet from Seville, who has commissioned for the library of his house two paintings, one of the Fall of Phaeton, the other the Rape of Ganymede. Barnard convincingly reflects on the paintings and the sonnets written by Arguijo on these two mythological figures, concluding from the comparison that "the sonnets serve as inscriptions to the paintings, at once validating their transgressive figures as emblems of the poet and creating within the paintings a site of memory for his fame" (109). Ultimately, however, the verbal medium takes precedence, as the poet's words "result in a more powerful celebration" of the material.With the essay of Steven Wagschal, "Writing on the Fractured T: Gongora's Iconographic Evocations of Vulcan, Venus, and Mars," we encounter a thoughtful analysis of Gongora's cancion entitled "iQue de invidiosos montes levantados! …

Moral Opposition to Philip in Pre-Lopean Drama

Abstract: No dudo yo, senr, sino que importa regir con dura freno la milicia, y que se de al soldado rienda corta cuando el se precipita en la injusticia. La fuerza del ejercito se acorta cuando va sin arrimode justicia, antique mas le acompanen a montones mil pintadas banderas y escnadrones(Cervantes, La Numancia vv. 57-64)As the Spanish Empire expanded in the second half of the sixteenth century, King Philip II's imperial policies began to change in a manner deemed by many to be immoral and unjust. Moralists and intellectuals of the day chose their own media to express their concern and fear of tyranny as Philip increasingly threatened to use military force to obtain the crown of Portugal in the late 1570s; moral treatises, pamphlets, epic poems, and dramatic works arose to communicate social commentary. Relatively recently, Golden Age scholars have begun to focus more attention on subversive political discourse written by dramatists preceding Lope de Vega (1562-1635) and the rise of the comcdia inteva, concentrating their efforts almost exclusively on Miguel de Cervantes's (1547-1616) La destruccion de Numancia (c. 1583). Furthermore, an increasing number of scholars has analyzed Cervantes's history play as a covert criticism of Philip II's government, rather than the overtly patriotic propaganda derived from a literal reading of the dialogue. In the 1970s, Alfredo Hermenegildo's book-length study La "Numancia" de Cervantes, which echoes some of his findings in his 1973 book on tragedy in the Spanish Renaissance, and Willard F. King's groundbreaking article represent two of the first challenges to the generally accepted reading of La Nitmancin as a proimperialistic work. Since then, works by the likes of Frederick A. de Armas, E. C. Graf, Michael Armstrong-Roche, Barbara Simerka, and later studies by Hermenegildo have surfaced that further validate the notion that in the play "imperial rule is seen in a troublesome light" (De Armas 130).While Cervantes's play certainly merits the meticulous studies it has received, it becomes apparent that La Numancia serves as only one example of a broader range of theatrical works from the 1570s and 1580s that portray similar derogatory opinions of the Spanish king. Hermenegildo reminds us that this time period contained a great amount of tension between the monarch in Castile and those on the periphery affected by his policies (Antologia 15), sentiments he expresses on other occasions (La tragedia 17; La "Numancia" 47; El tirano 14). A thorough investigation of the plays of Gabriel Lobo Lasso de la Vega (1559-1623), Jeronimo Bermudez (1530?-1605?), el canonigo Francisco Augustin Tarrega (1553?-1623), Cristobal de Virues (1550?-1609), Cervantes, and especially Juan de la Cueva (1543-1612), reveals two important points: there existed a very real fear of tyrannical overlordship among Golden Age Spaniards, and the critical discourse contained in these works draws attention to the notion that the reign of Philip II was by no means free from dissenting voices.1Several plays by these writers speak directly or indirectly to their creators' reservations about Philip's shift from his father's policy of Christian Imperialism to the pursuit of a more aggressive Universal Monarchy. Until the 1570s, Philip had continued Charles V's method of not expanding his European territories, at least not at the expense of other Christians. Rather, he seemed to have taken a more defensive approach; but when he claimed the Portuguese crown for himself, this signaled a change in policy and ignited great criticism from many of his subjects, including these playwrights. These writers regarded this new strategy as dangerous and unjustified, as seen by their depiction of tyranny, as well as their illustration in many instances of the consequences of either autocratic rule or ambition.2The injustice of tyranny, despotic rulers, and totalitarian regimes influenced by ambitious courtiers, were popular literary and dramatic themes in the Golden Age. …

Cañizares's Textual Auto-da-fé: Inquisitorial Dogs and Martyred Witches in Cervantes's Novela y coloquio que pasó entre Cipión y Berganza

Abstract: At one point in Cervantes's Novela y coloquio que paso entre Cipion y Bergnnza,1 Cipion-the more literary-minded of the conversing dogs-likens Berganza's narration to an octopus, due to its monstrous proliferation of limb-like digressions. Cipion's criticism is closely aligned with Horace's observation in the Ars poetica that the haphazard combining of incongruous elements results in a book whose "idle fantasies are shaped like a sick man's dreams so that neither head nor foot can be assigned to a single shape" (7-8).2 What are we to make of the fact that the Coloquio, according to Cervantes's conceit, is communicated to us by a convalescing syphilitic: the ensign Campuzano? Might we be justified in assuming that the colloquy is simply an "idle fantasy," the phantasmagoric residue of this "sick man's dream"? Certainly, Campuzano's friend, the licentiate Peralta, is only too ready to dismiss it as a hallucinatory reverie, a tissue of "disparates" (Casaniiento enganoso, 537).Despite its unlikely cast of caviling dogs and philosophizing witches, the Coloquio is no more a Horatian "monster," the ill-begotten fruit of a syphilitic's dreams, than the Quijotc is a product of an "esteril y mal cultivado ingenio." Cervantes's use of such rhetorical devices to distance himself from the text and displace responsibility for its content is a common feature of his satire; however, the implementation of so many, and such elaborate, screening devices (the text as we have it is a belated transcription ot a conversation between two loquacious dogs preserved in the pocky memory of a convalescing syphilitic!) simply confirms what critics have long understood: the motley group of corrupt butchers, thieving gypsies, predacious shepherds, amateur impresarios, and the like-the familiar misfits of Cervantine satire brought to life by Berganza's tale-are all, in a sense, ancillary actors in a drama with moral and philosophical implications that extend well beyond this picaresque veneer.Though a first glance at the Coloquio satisfies a reader's formal expectations of satire through its studied counterpoising of canine "humanity" against human "bestiality" (a conventional ploy), further investigation reveals that this general pattern is trivial; what is essential-for it goes to the very heart of the text-is the disconcerting revelation that the Cohquio's dogs, for all their lauded humanity, engage in the most contemptible sort of human behavior, whereas the "bestial" Canizares (whose body, as we shall see, is described in strongly animalistic terms) exhibits the noblest aspects of human behavior.Critical essays on the Coloquio tend to confirm this strong inclination to give more heed to the sententious "circunloquios y rodeos" (568) of a dog, Berganza, than to the eloquent and straightforward reasoning of a witch: Berganza's hypocrisy, treachery, and ingratitude are too readily forgiven and Canizares's virtues too easily overlooked. Berganza's canine torm, apparent candor, and penchant for moralization compromise our ability to judge him impartially; we turn a blind eye to behavior that would be deemed inexcusable in a human. The pages that follow represent an attempt to "redeem" Canizares, reevaluate Berganza, and explore Cervantes's insights concerning the fundamentally paradoxical nature of evil.It is one of the peculiarities of humans and, it would seem, reasoning dogs, that they must rely on other peoples' testimony to account for their beginnings, for even though one is alive, the early years of life are-as Augustine famously notes in his Confessions-shrouded in a veil of amnesia; knowledge of one's origin and infancy is always secondhand and belated. Only the most dishonest-or self-deceived-autobiographer would presume to offer a first-hand account of such moments as his or her own birth, infancy, hours lost to sleep, and death. Disposed to privilege subjective experience, however spotty, over hearsay, Berganza begins his narrative-against Cipton's repeated objections-not with Canizares's account of his biological birth (as putative son of the "ganapan," Rodriguez, and the witch, Ia Monliela), but with his birth into consciousness. …

You Might Be Able to Get There From Here: Reconsidering Borges and the Postmodern (review)

Abstract: FRISCH, MARK. You Might Be Able to Get There From Here: Reconsidering Borges and the Postmodern. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2004.Ever since the publication of John Earth's 1967 essay "The Literature of Exhaustion" Jorge Luis Borges has been viewed in the United States as a key figure in international postmodernism. His narrative experiments and his ideas about literature have been widely lauded, imitated and echoed by major writers in the postmodern canon. In the book here under review, Mark Frisch describes Borges as "one of [the] early founders or precursors" (16) of postmodernism, and sets out to define the precise relationship between the great Argentine author and the postmodern. His focus is on Borges's philosophy or his "larger vision" (56), as he calls it. His basic argument is that Borges's work marks a sharp break with modernism. While the account Frisch provides of Borges's thinking on subjects such as epistemology, history, the self, and politics is on the whole appealing and plausible, we will see that the historical argument about the transition from modernism to postmodernism is marred by a very superficial definition of the first of these two concepts, and by the author's confusion about his own intellectual pedigree.Frisch's definition of postmodernity is part Jean-Francois Lyotard, part Richard Rorty. The key to the postmodern vision is that "we have lost our faith in the metanarratives on which our society has depended, and which defined our utopian visions (Christianity, Marxism, Capitalism, Reason, Science, Positivism)" (69). One reaction to this claim might be to wonder who this "we" is, to whom the author refers. The present occupant of the White House proves that there are still plenty of people in our society who believe in Christianity and Capitalism (though not always in Science or Reason). Still, the Lyotardian definition is helpful in accounting for certain significant (though by no means universal) phenomena of our time, which Frisch describes as "an indeterminacy, a decentering, a mixing of the highbrow and lowbrow, a reaching out to the margins, and a challenge to the privileged status of knowledge and of authority in general" (69). At the same time, Frisch rejects the radical relativism some have extracted from the contemporary epistemological crisis. In order to skirt the threat of nihilism, the author adds an element of philosophical pragmatism to the postmodern mix. According to Frisch, "postmodern culture does not destroy or totally reject 'truth value,' but simply redefines it as systems that we construct to meet our needs" (70). This, he maintains, is precisely the balance Borges expresses in his work. The Argentine author played a key role in exploring notions of randomness and indeterminacy, in blurring the boundaries between reality and fiction, and in re-examining our concepts of literature and history. But Frisch makes a convincing case that Borges did not tend toward the absolute relativism and celebration of chaos of some thinkers associated with postmodernism, but rather that his "orientation came closest to those postmodern writers and critics who affirm that positive knowledge is possible" (49). To explain Borges's concept of knowledge, Frisch makes suggestive use of the metaphor of the labyrinth: "Borges seems to suggest that one can create a sense of order within an impenetrable, chaotic labyrinth, and that with the help of certain man-made signposts, travel from one part of the labyrinth may certainly be possible. However, deciphering the overall, ultimate structure and order of that labyrinth proves impossible" (49). The rather odd title of Frisch's book refers to this redefined notion of truth and knowledge.The Borges who emerges from this book is skeptical, pluralist and open-minded. In the course of his book, Frisch explores how Borges's core epistemological stance plays out in various areas, such as his notion of the self, his attitude toward gender, and his views on politics. …

Making Time with Pedro Salinas: Víspera del gozo (1926)

Abstract: The twentieth-century Spanish writer Pedro Salinas (1891-1951) loved the elements of modern life. In addition to dedicating poems to city streets, cinema, and automobiles, he avidly pored over newspapers and train schedules.1 We can easily imagine these two forms of reading occupying Saunas as he traveled to and lro between his university postings in different cities-Paris (1914-1917), Cambridge (1922-1923), and Seville (1919-1928)-and Madrid, his hometown and the heart of his literary activities. While we do not know if these commutes inspired Salinas's second published book, reading and travel figure notably in it, as do train stations, hotels, and other aspects of urban living.Now considered "one of the standard-bearers of vanguard art" (Spires, Transparent 144), Vispera del gazo appeared in 1926; its title maintained the forward-looking register of Presagios (1924), Salinas's earlier collection of poems, and Jt bore the newly-minted pedigree of Nova Novorum, the series of avant-garde prose sponsored by Ortega's Revista de Occidente. The volume contains seven narratives, six of which concern a character on the cusp-the vispera-of an event: in "Mundo cerrado," Andres is on a train to visit a friend; Angel spends most of "Cita de los tres" wondering if Matilde will arrive; Jorge fritters away a couple of hours before meeting his girlfriend, "Aurora de verdad"; and so on. Indeed, nothing much happens, and Antonlo Candau, following Gustavo Perez Firmat, has remarked that Salinas's book typifies vanguard texts in that it represents a "vispera de mucho y fiesta de nada" ("El presente" 42).2The absent "mucho" of Candau's pithy description, however, has been the object of some discussion, as readers have focused on the missing, or at least long-delayed figure of the woman in Vispera. They see her varlously as an invisible muse generating the narrative (Del Pino), an elusive emblem for the undecidability of reading (Gertz; Candau, "Entrada"), and a stereotypical object of desire (Spires, "New Art"). Others have concentrated on the awaited reunlon with the female character, seeing it as a recuperatlon of prelapsarian unity (Feal, "Lo real") or, in a similar vein, the achievement of an all-encompassing moment of transcendence (Hartfield-Mendez).Although these are worthwhile approaches, I would like to attend to the other half of Candau's characterizatlon. Is it true that Vispera, as a "fiesta de nada," celebrates nothing, is about nothing? Certainly it contains no plot per se and very little actlon. Its characters do not develop in any noteworthy fashlon, and at the end of the texts nothing seems resolved. But if these missing narrative dimenslons constitute the "nada," Vispera also contains an "algo." Ubiquitous and pervasive, this "algo" appears in the first sentence of the book-"Paso dos horas leyendo" (9)-and then everywhere after that: "cinco minutos mas tarde" (11), "dos anos de vida" (22), "las seis de la tarde" (31), "las seis menos cuarto" (49), "diez minutos" (54), "ese cuarto de hora" (59), "las diez" (87), "las ocho y media" (87), "treinta minutos mas tarde" (90), "hace diez anos" (97), "casi un mes" (97), "la una y treinta y cinco" (123), "las once y media" (146), "las ocho y cinco" (148).3 Even in the one text, "Delirios del chopo y el cipres," that reduces the human element to a framing device-a train passenger disembarks to meditate on the merits of movement versus immobility, represented by the poplar and cypress-time consciousness remains an overriding presence in the images of months, seasons, and the passage from day to night.Why this obsession with time? What did Salinas want to convey about it, and how might he have developed his ideas? One obvious answer points to Proust, master of time and memory in twentieth-century prose. In the early 1920s Salinas published Spanish translations of the first two volumes of Reincnibnina' of Things Past (still used by the Madrid press Alianza), and ever since reviewers have identified similarities (or dissimilarities) between the two authors. …

El feliz cautiverio de Gonzalo Guerrero

Abstract: En los albores del siglo XVI Gonzalo Guerrero, el primer n?ufrago ameri cano, opt? por integrarse en la vida de sus captores. Repudiado durante sig los por traici?n a su raza, Gonzalo Guerrero se ha convertido en un icono del mestizaje y de la resistencia contra la conquista del Yucat?n. Su rehabilitaci?n ret?rica en el siglo XXI descubre la nostalgia irreflexiva del viajero ante el territorio de su deseo. Anhelosos de alejarse del espacio de nepantla, u orfan dad c?smica, los promulgadores del icono articulan a su vez una f?bula represiva: al "recuperar" una uni?n m?tica, disimulan el conflicto y la dife rencia en un simulacro de armon?as perdidas. El Relato de Gonzalo Guerrero, una cr?nica de or?genes debatidos, elude estas f?rmulas f?ciles: el texto no ofrece conclusiones concretas sobre el valor moral de la conquista y la dif?cil transculturaci?n que es el presunto arranque de la modernidad mexicana. Sin embargo, los hechos de su existencia y promulgaci?n dentro del contexto de esta tradici?n reclaman la atenci?n de quienes estudian la producci?n y el vigor de los iconos nacionales. Gonzalo Guerrero y su mejor conocido compa?ero, Jer?nimo de Aguilar, fueron los n?ufragos originales en la historia de Am?rica. Su nave se fue a pique en 1511 con unos 20 miembros m?s de la tripulaci?n de Pedro de Valdi via procedente de Dari?n. Tras un espantoso viaje en lancha, los pocos so brevivientes desembarcaron en la costa del Yucat?n cerca de Tulum, donde cayeron casi inmediatamente en manos de los ind?genas de la regi?n. Seg?n las cr?nicas, algunos fueron sacrificados en el acto, y los dem?s acorralados con destino a la cocina del enemigo. La fuga de estos cautivos fue tan breve

Zarzuela and the Anti-musical Prejudice of the Spanish Enlightenment

Abstract: During the last third of the eighteenth century, the Madrilenian society, particularly the emerging classes of professionals and civil servants who would constitute the prime theater audience in the following century, began to favor dances and songs of native musical genres such as zarzuela and tonadilla escenica over the aristocratic preference for the refined arias of Italian opera seria, which dominated the aristocratic stages since the beginning of the 1700s. This is not surprising, as all around Europe a favorable sensitivity toward autochthonous culture was boosting hybrid musical genres that combined elements of popular and high culture. Examples of this include the Italian opera buffa, the French opera comique, and the German Singspiel. What is notable, however, is that while these European genres led, during the following century, to the creation of a national opera, the Spanish zarzuela did not. Whereas "Spain" is found everywhere in modern opera (from Mozart's Don Giovanni to Rossini's Il barbiere di Siviglia; from Beethoven's Fidelia to Verdi's Don Carlo to Bizet's Carmen), Spanish authors did not produce an operatic voice in the same terms as their European colleagues. In the following pages, I argue that what I call "the anti-musical prejudice of the Spanish Enlightenment" played an important role in preventing zarzuela from transforming itself into a European-like genre, and indirectly boosted the differential development of the Spanish musical theater. By exploring the intellectual polemic that surrounded eighteenth-century zarzuela, we can trace the aesthetic compromises of its particular style. While writers such as Caspar de Jovellanos, Tomas de Iriarte, and Leandro Fernandez de Moratin strongly censured the combination of vernacular music and drama, other authors of the same period such as Ramon de la Cruz engaged in the task of writing popular musical theater. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Spanish academia labeled the former as ilustrados, and the latter as traditionalist or casticistas. From our standpoint, however, the distinction seems blurry-in fact, both ilustrados and castidstas were part of the same cultural and intellectual milieu. As I will show, both positions, although apparently incompatible, must be regarded as indispensable factors in the differential development of zarzuela.During the eighteenth century, the fusion of cultured and profane traditions, and particularly the emergence of hybrid genres of musical theater, transformed the way in which European philosophy related ethics to music. Although a general definition of modern music implies an inevitable reductionism, two moments constitute a turning point from which musicians and European societies changed their relationship with music. The first, the querelle des bouffons in France (1752-1754) brought into music similar discussions on the idea of "taste" aroused in literature by the querelle des antiques et modernes in the previous century.1 The second, the birth of the philosophy of aesthetics in Germany during the mid-eighteenth century created a mandate for aesthetic autonomy. Neither the Encyclopedistes' critique of old musical techniques nor the German apology of aesthetic autonomy were intended to oppose music and morals. Neither did they wish to render music a mere object of contemplation. Rather, European philosophers of the late eighteenth century such as Rousseau, Schiller, and Schlegel regarded music and the new musical genres as tools for social education of modern subjectivity.2 Aesthetic autonomy, in fact, was not a goal in itself, but a postulate to guarantee freedom when producing musical judgments.3 Previously, art was aimed to communicate ethical values whereas in the eighteenth century, it was deemed to define morality. Music was the preferred means of configuring the new subjectivity, since its abstract language favored a relationship in which aesthetic autonomy was safeguarded more than in any other form of art. …

Configuring the nation in fin-de-siècle Spain : Rosario de acuña's La Voz De La Patria

Abstract: In October 1893 the Spanish government called up its army reserves to defend the garrison town of Melilla against the Rif Arabs. Rosario de Acuna's La voz de la Patria, a one-act play in verse first performed in December that same year, is a contemporary drama written in response to the crisis.1 In it Acuna's cast are not so much individuals as stock characters who present contrasting theses on what constitutes the nation as patria. In the following article I propose to explore how Acuna's depiction of the conflict in Melilla serves a double purpose. First, I will demonstrate how it works to privilege the concept of national unity, founded on civic duty, virtuous reason and the transcending of class barriers, that is essential to the consolidation of nineteenth-century liberalism. secondly, however, it encapsulates the diverse paradoxes dominant in Spanish liberalism in the latter part of the century.In particular, Melilla becomes a symbolic space that not only allows Acuna to interrogate Spain's imperial pretensions. More importantly, it represents a means of revindicating the ideals of Progressive liberalism, associated with republicanism and federalism, and critiquing the Moderate liberalism of the Restoration period.2 The viewpoints put forward in the play will be compared with those discourses of freethinking liberalism elaborated in 1893 in articles from the weekly publication, Las Dominicales del Libre Pensamiento, to which Acuna was a regular contributor.3Set in an unspecified Aragonese village just two days' march from the French border, La voz is not intended to be, Acuna states, "obra de lucha, de controversia," but "el eco de una realidad del presente" ("Dedicatoria" 6). Its opening broaches the dilemma to be resolved: whether or not twenty-three-year-old Pedro, the only surviving child of Maria and Juan, well-off landholders, should fulfil his patriotic duty and join the Spanish forces in Melilla. Whereas Maria and Pedro's pregnant fiancee, Isabel, urge him to escape conscription and flee to France, Juan and fifty-year-old Rosa, Pedro's former wetnurse, argue vehemently for responding to the nation's call to its reservists. The initial lack of consensus among members of an extended family unit to heed the nation's request places in doubt any one vision of Spain and highlights how national identities are configured through competing discourses. Likewise, the eventual resolution of differences, so that all characters eventually speak with one voice, advocates an imaginary national unity attainable through reason and dialogue.Unity, as Paloma Cirujano Marin, Teresa Elorriaga Planes and Juan Sisinio Perez, Garzon have insisted, is central to nineteenth-century paradigms of the Spanish liberal nation. Moreover, they affirm, it was through the diverse meanings attached to the word espanol that these paradigms were either justified or discredited:Segun se entienda lo especifico espanol, asi se argumentara en favor de un regimen tradicionalista, moderado, progresista o democrate. Nos encontramos [. . .] una vez mas ante el concepto de nacion espanola como nueva realidad que ya no solo se utiliza para vertebrar los hechos del pasado, sino tambien para justificar la pertinencia o la inconsistencia de las distintas posiciones politicas inmersas en la revolucion liberal. (153)A similar process to that pertaining to espanol can be mapped, I suggest, in the different meanings and values attributed to patria by Acuna's characters. Following the French revolution, the concept of putria was inextricably intertwined with those of society and nation, since all privileged the loyalty of the individual to the sociopolitical community and the collective good.4 It is this framework that assumes prominence in Acuna's work.Of primary significance throughout the play, therefore, is the question of whether an individual's primary allegiance should be to family or nation. Central to this concern are the themes of maternal love and female honor, which allow Acuna to explore the various relationships envisaged as ideal between the nation, its citizens, and its colonies. …

Jaime Torres Bodet's Primero de enero : The anti-novel of the Mexican Revolution

Abstract: Among Mexican novelists of the 19205 and 19305, Jaime Torres Bodet stands out as a figure driven by what Octavio Paz has called "the will to be modern." During the 19205 and 19305, he-along with other members of the Contemporaneos group-produced a series of novels experimenting with the modern techniques of narration that had been developed by Marcel Proust and James Joyce. These two decades saw the production of some of the most radical experiments with narrative form in Mexico, a modernist corpus that includes five novels by Torres Bodet-Margarita de niebla (1926), La educacion sentimental (1929), Estrella de dia (1931), Proserpina rescatada (1931), and Primera de enero (1935)-as well as Xavier Villaurrutia's Dama de corazones (1928) and Gilberto Owen's Novela como nube (1928). In Idle Fictions, Gustavo Peez Firmat has studied how these texts exploded the conventions of narrative form by doing away with recognizable plots, characters, and novelistic structure.Out of this corpus of Mexican modernist novels, there is one that has not yet been studied: Primero de enero, Torres Bodet's last novel, and a work that marks the end of the period of experimentation with narrative form among Mexican writers. I will show that this is an extremely important work, for it foregrounds Torres Bodet's dialogue with two modernist writers-James Joyce and Marcel Proust-as well as his position vis-a-vis the impassioned debates that marked Mexican letters in the decades of the 1920s and 1930s. As I will argue, this novel can be read as Torres Bodet's critique of the writer who dominated the Mexican literary scene in the post-revolutionary period-Mariano Azuela. Primera de enero, I will demonstrate, is the anti-novel of the Mexican Revolution.My analysis will highlight Torres Bodet's fascination with the relation between technology and narrative techniques: Primero de enero creates a narrative space inhabited by the technological artifacts of the modern era: cameras, adding machines, dictaphones, typewriters, and other versions of writing machines. By combining the use of experimental narrative techniques and the representation of technological artifacts, the novelist sought to rejuvenate Mexican narrative in the post-revolutionary period. Primera de enero represents Torres Bodet's most radical effort at producing a thoroughly modern novel. More than any of the writer's other writings, this work addresses the complex relationship between the representation of technology and the technologization of narrative-a double movement through which Torres Bodet distances himself and his fiction from the post-revolutionary injunction to write nationalist novels.Primero de eneroPrimero de enero frustrates the reader's expectations for a recognizable plot. Almost nothing happens in the novel, which recounts twelve hours in the life of Gonzalo Castillo, the director of the "Sociedad General de Comercio y Exportacion," a powerful trade organization that controls much of his city's commercial activity. The narrative opens with Gonzalo waking up at 5:15 am on New Year's Day. Overcome by a sense of purposelessness, he walks to his office even though the entire building is closed for the holiday. After shuffling through some papers and deciding to quit his job, he strolls throughout the city streets, where he bemusedly contemplates the towering billboards advertising products controlled by his office. He continues strolling until he arrives at a city park, where a guard arrests him for entering the premises without an admission ticket. As he waits to be booked, Gonzalo becomes intrigued by Felipe Robles, a young photographer who has taken the picture of every criminal who has ever passed though the police station, including the infamous Fernando Snickers, the assassin of President Lindarte.Noticing Gonzalo's fascination with the story of the killer, the photographer offers to introduce him to Snicker's daughter, whom he knows. After the police chief recognizes him and drops the charges, Gonzalo and the photographer visit Rosa Snickers, who lives a humble existence in a tenement. …

The Trouble with Gender in Lorca's Suites: "Surtidores"

Abstract: Et je nie comparais aux palimpsestes; je goutais la joie du savant, qui, sons les ecritures plus recentes, decouvre, sur un meme papier, un texte tres ancien infiniment plus precieux Quel etait ce texte occulte? Pour le lire, ne fallait-il pas tout d'abord effacer les textes recents?Andre Gide, L'ImmoralisteEl arte parere ser el empeno en ilescifrar o perseguir la huella dejada par una forma perdida de existenciaMaria Zambrano, "Apuntes sobre cl tiempo y la poesia"Although the contexts for these two quotations are quite different, Maria Zambrano's words, like Gide's, suggest a way to think about reading (and writing) desire Gide uses the metaphor of a palimpsest to talk about recovering a self for whom love of the same sex is possible;1 Maria Zambrano's words-descifrar, huella, perdida-suggest that all art arises from a desire on the part of the artist to make out the traces of an unfulfilled existence What is true, moreover, for the artist is also true for the reader: just as the artist may see his or her life as a palimpsest, so, too, may the reader see the text the artist has created out of his or her desire as a partially obscured writingA palimpsest teases the reader to find an older text that was removed in order to make way for a new one, which has been written over it So it poses from the outset something of a paradox: how can one read what has been all but occluded? Does it not really amount to trying to retrace steps that were never taken?And yet, as any reader knows, if the object of the search is desire, then the effort to find the older text is in itself an instantiation of what one is looking for Gide's narrator, for example, speaks of discovering a younger (truer) self under an older and more recent one, convinced as he is that the weight of inauthentic years had not extinguished a more genuine way of being His is an effort, therefore, that presupposes the desire that is being recovered Za m brano suggests somewhat ambiguously, in keeping with her Platonic inspiration, that the object of desire-the forgotten mode of existence-may be located in the past, in one's childhood, or that perhaps it had never come clearly into view at all (Desire, as Plato reminds us in The Symposium, is born of a lack') And yet, again, to begin to seek desire out is already to acknowledge its insistence, its presence in the here and nowIt strikes me that Lorca was engaged in precisely this kind of inquiry about {his} desire when he wrote his suites3 Andre Belamich, who first reconstructed Lorca's unfinished project and published the collection as a book (Suites 1983), argued that these early poems take us straight to the heart of Lorca's most intimate "pena," having to do with hopes of a fatherhood that might never be (13): in other words, for Belamich, it was the author's worry about his homosexuality that was uppermost in his mind when writing the suites, and this worry was more discernible in these texts than in any other However, these words and those of many others who have written on the subject, lose sight of the fact that the same poems, in which Lorca's melancholy is clearest, derive their poignancy precisely from the fact that the poet writes as one who comes to see the inevitability of his difference And that, as he writes, a different desire, almost completely muted by the melancholy it provokes, struggles for recognition It is this suppressed aspect of the poetic self, susceptible to another desire existing only in palimpsest-half-occluded, halt-visible-, that haunts the poetry of Suites'To say this is not to reduce the many signs in Lorca's poetry to one or to claim to find something in his poetry that has never before been seen; it is, rather, a way to appreciate how we readers are called upon to (re)create a text that the author himself has left partially unwritten-while recognizing that the ambiguity arising therein, from its being partially unwritten-, is all of a piece with the lyric as Lorca conceived it …

Luis martin-santos y el 98 : ¿Tiempo de corrección?

Abstract: A pesar de que Tiempo de silencio es una de las novelas espa?olas modernas m?s estudiadas, quedan algunos aspectos que a?n no han sido resueltos satis factoriamente. Uno de ellos es la actitud de Mart?n-Santos hacia los escrito res de medio siglo antes, los llamados noventay o chistas, cuya obra era evidentemente conocida por el autor de Tiempo de silencio pero no necesaria mente aplaudida. Es mi intenci?n en el presente trabajo abordar la cuesti?n de la relaci?n de Mart?n-Santos con algunos de aquellos escritores desde una perspectiva algo distinta, llevado por la sospecha de que el tema no siempre ha sido tratado con la debida ecuanimidad. En su conocido libro de 1971, Novela y semidesarrollo, escrib?a Fernando Moran:

Cervantes y Sor Juana: la hipótesis del barroco

Abstract: El tercer centenario de la publicación de la primera parte del Quijote se caracterizó por la extraordinaria lectura documental de la novela. Se celebró el Quijote como documento empı́rico de su época a la que puntualmente retrataba: las clases sociales y sus diferencias, la pobreza y sus penurias, la vida marginal y su precariedad. En una monografı́a titulada Estado social que refleja ‘‘El Quijote’’ (premiada por la Real Academia de Ciencias Morales y Polı́ticas con motivo de ese centenario) Julio Puyol y Alonso cotejó ‘‘aquellos calamitosos tiempos’’ (10) y concluyó, revelando la perspectiva de su lectura, que la situación no diferı́a demasiado del presente español. A comienzos del siglo XX la perpetuidad del Quijote era, evidentemente, su actualidad. En este cuarto centenario hemos privilegiado el carácter universal de la novela seguramente desde el presente ya no de España sino del español sin fronteras. Cervantes habı́a anticipado la lectura de su novela como una avanzada de la lengua española, cuando en su dedicatoria al conde de Lemos, le cuenta, no sin humor, que el emperador de la China le habı́a escrito una carta suplicándole le enviase la Segunda parte, ‘‘porque querı́a fundar un colegio donde se leyese lengua castellana y querı́a que el libro que se leyese fuese el de la historia de Don Quijote. Juntamente con esto me decı́a que fuese yo a ser el rector de tal colegio’’ (547). Por eso mismo, no creemos hoy que sea preciso defender las raı́ces clásicas, cristianas o castellanas, de la novela contra sus filiaciones italianas o bizantinas. Nuestra lectura del Quijote se ha hecho más cervantina, más creativa y dialógica; y hemos aprendido a incorporar sus dilemas de afincamiento crı́tico (su locación) pero también

Las Tierras de la memoria: las esteticas sin territorio de Witold Gombrowicz y Felisberto Hernandez

Abstract: En 1939 Gombrowicz viaja a Buenos Aires desde Polonia y allı́, obligado a exiliarse por los comienzos de la guerra, comienza la redacción de Transatlántico, una novela en que vuelca sus experiencias de destierro y su nueva condición de apátrida. En la publicación Papeles de Buenos Aires (1943–1946), Gombrowicz coincide con Felisberto Hernández y es allı́ donde se publican fragmentos de Tierras de la memoria, novela autobiográfica cuya versión ı́ntegra sólo aparecerı́a en forma póstuma en 1969. Hernández y Gombrowicz comparten no sólo este espacio de publicación propiciado por los hermanos Obieta, sino que sus narrativas revelan una estética que tiene en común las experiencias de dislocación espacial y ‘‘excentricidad’’. Me concentraré aquı́ en Tierras de la memoria y Transatlántico, libros en los cuales se niegan la

The Spacious Word: Cartography, Literature, and Empire in Early Modern Spain (review)

Abstract: PADRON, RICARDO. The Spacious Word: Cartography, Literature, and Empire in Early Modern Spain. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2004. xvi + 287 pp.Among the most famous paintings in the Museo del Prado hangs a large canvas by Velazquez entitled La rendicion de Breda, sometimes known as Las lanzas. In the foreground of the painting, Velazquez depicts the impressive culmination of a great military course of events: the transfer of the key to the city of Breda from the Dutch army to the Genoan-born commander of the Spanish forces, Ambrosio Spinola. Behind them, in the maplike background against which this action is set, the smoke of war rises from the landscape, bordered by a checkered flag and framed by the vertical lances that have made the painting famous. The work could well have been a point of departure for The Spacious Word by Ricardo Padron, which deals with both cartographical practices in early modern Spain and with the maplike qualities of a number of early modern Spanish texts, the so-called chronicles of the Indies most prominent among them. But if the Velazquez image had been the focal point of this study, the author might have reached very different conclusions from the ones he urges in this provocative and wide-reaching book. For whereas The Spacious Word seeks to demonstrate the affinities between early modern mapping and the "cartographical prose" of this same era, Velasquez brings together the visual form of the map and the representation of grand deeds in a way that allows us to recognize their separate historical roots even while they converge to make an impressive view of action and its place.How then does Padron regard the affinities between the mapping practices of the early modern world and the "cartographic prose" of the chronicles of Indies? He argues in a twofold way. First, he claims that the representation of space in an abstract, gridlike form, which we have come to regard as normative for maps, was not at all widespread in the early modern world. On the contrary, he suggests that the large-scale development and regularization of what we conceive as "modern" mapping practices happened much later than is often supposed. "Abstract" mapping was the province of a few experts, and hardly played a significant ideological role in the project of conquest and imperial expansion. Indeed, Padron produces compelling evidence in the form of written texts and printed images to suggest that early modern mapping practice owed far more than is usually supposed to earlier, medieval ways of representing the world. Well into the early modern age there survived an array of mapping practices whose fundamental notion of space was linear. Distance, the line, and the itinerary, rather than an encompassing sense of space, were the points of orientation for the vast majority of mapmakers throughout the early modern age. Indeed, the makers of maps could not truly aspire to an accurate and abstract representation of the surface of the earth until the problem of longitude was solved, and that did not occur until the development of timepieces adequate to the required measurements in the eighteenth century. Until that time, mapping practice was not only linear but was also subject to an arbitrariness that was driven by interests and ideologies somewhat alien to those that came into play with the rise of scientific views about world representation. Witness the ad hoc arguments and the contradictions leading up to and following the Treaty of Tordesillas, which separated Spanish and Portuguese claims over in the newly discovered parts of the globe by an imaginary vertical line running near the Cape Verde Islands in the Atlantic.Far more than can be indicated in the space of a brief review, Padron has a very deep understanding both of the technical and scientific issues involved in mapmaking and of the historical needs that were instrumental in sustaining Spain's national interest in this technology, especially the desire to find secure and reliable routes to (and itineraries through) the lands that its explorers were "discovering. …

Si tal era el dedo, cual seria el cuerpo!: The Archival Project of Sor Maria Josefa de la Santisima Trinidad (1783)

Abstract: Since the arrival of the Spaniards to the New World, religion became an instrument of political expansion, social control and identity construction.1 Literary critics and cultural historians have emphasized the political and social significance of the convents in colonial Spanish America and their vital role in economic activities and social services. Their social function and political significance was achieved thanks to the work of many religious women who as founders, directors or practitioners established a close connection between the outside/secular world and the inside/spiritual world of the convent. As Electa Arenal and Stacey Schlau have indicated, "By choosing chastity, religious women expanded their opportunities in a society as a whole, acting as teachers, protectors, creators, and spiritual healers" (297). Nuns definitely also had to depend on the outside world in order to keep their institutions alive. Dowries and contributions became two of the most needed sources of economic stability, especially in small convents with lesser means.2 As Kathryn Burns aptly states, for nuns "spiritual and economic goals" were "inextricably connected" (208).This essay approaches the convent precisely as a national and social institution deeply connected to the political outside world. I specifically examine the efforts made by a particular nun to write the forgotten history of her convent in order to preserve a glorious past and to produce a written account that could serve as a spiritual guide for future generations. My study focuses on the religious chronicle compiled and edited by the Peruvian nun Maria Josefa de la Santisima Trinidad in 1783 entitled, Historia de lu Fundacion del Monasterio de Trinitarias Descalzas de Lima. I first offer a historical overview of the political and economic situation faced by Peruvian convents during the eighteenth century in order to understand why nuns such as Sor Maria Josefa felt the need to project their convents as crucial institutions in the process of educating new Peruvian generations. The second part of the essay is devoted to the analysis of Maria Josefa's chronicle-especially her introduction-and the forging of her text as a cultural patrimony and written evidence of the religious heroic virtues that characterized the lives of many of the nuns who inhabited the convent of Trinitarias Descalzas. I underscore that at a time when many convents were facing a period of crisis and decay, the urgency to document the history of a convent became a crucial tool to justify the still important need for the existence of the convent as a religious and social institution. The archival endeavor of Maria Josefa de la Trinidad went hand-in-hand with the articulation of a local sense of national identity that could serve as an exemplary religious model to be followed by future generations as well as a testimonial of Peru's religious prestige. Sor Maria Josefa's project was anchored in what I call a religious patriotism; a type of discourse that claimed a love of one's country on the basis of religious principles. In sum, for this nun, the reconstruction of a glorious past turned into a process of representation of a religious institution in search of social recognition and cultural visibility.Religious Reforms and Their Impact on Peruvian ConventsIn 1565, as a result of decrees issued by Philip II, the religious authorities of the Viceroyalty of Peru summoned the first Concilia limeno with the purpose of adapting the decrees of the Council of Trent to their social reality. In 1568, the Concilia Provincial established 132 decrees which aimed to regulate religious life in the Peruvian viceroyalty. The sixteenth-century Peruvian mandates established by the four councils (1565, 1566, 1567, and 1583) survived until the eighteenth century,3 when the deterioration of religious institutions prompted Charles III to call for new Concilios provinciales in 1769.4Continuous denunciations by religious authorities to the King, with regard to the lack of discipline observed in many of the nunneries, constituted a major reason why the Peruvian councils were ordered. …

Retorno al "paraíso panal": derecho civil y canónico como claves eucarísticas en el Tratado segundo de Lazarillo de Tormes

Abstract: La importancia del tema religioso en La vida de Lazarillo de Tormes y de sus fortunas y adversidades, publicada casi simultáneamente en Burgos, Alcalá de Henares, Medina del Campo y Amberes en 1554, es evidente por cuanto, en los siete Tratados que componen el texto, Lazarillo sirve al menos a cuatro amos que son clérigos de uno u otro tipo: el clérigo de Maqueda, el fraile de la Merced, el buldero y el arcipreste de San Salvador. Uno más, el ciego, aunque laico, representa la práctica del intercambio de oraciones por pago de una limosna. Por otro lado, tanto la estructura episódica del texto como la heterogeneidad de los amos relacionados con la religión—un laico, un clérigo regular (el fraile), otro itinerante (el buldero), y otros dos diocesanos de diferente estatus (el de Maqueda y el arcipreste)—evidencian que el tema religioso se aborda desde diferentes perspectivas, lo que hace necesario un estudio detallado de la presentación del tema religioso y su problemática en cada Tratado. En efecto, al enfrentarse al Tratado segundo, sobre el que versa este trabajo y en el que Lazarillo sirve al clérigo de Maqueda, la crı́tica ha ofrecido lecturas que relacionan el texto—sobre todo su última parte—con un aspecto muy particular y especı́fico: el de la celebración eucarı́stica. Tales lecturas han servido de base para interpretaciones ideológicas que relacionan la obra con movimientos crı́ticos del catolicismo dominante en la España del siglo XVI

Transamerican Literary Relations and the Nineteenth-Century Public Sphere (review)

Abstract: BRICKHOUSE, ANNA. Transamerican Literary Relations and the Nineteenth-Century Public Sphere. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004Hay un punto del que la argumentacion de Anna Brickhouse parte en su excelente libro Transamerican Literary Relations and the Nineteenth-Century Public Sphere. Es un punto de condensacion y coalescencia de sentidos sobre la participacion de los intelectuales en el armado de las relaciones hemisfericas, pero al mismo tiempo es un punto de fuga. Es aquel donde la politica en su cara mas cruda desarma todas las pretensiones de buena voluntad diplomatica, donde la lectura de una transversalidad deja en claro como se construyo un entramado impenetrable de verticalidad y jerarquia. Alli donde convergen, y a la vez se disparan, los proyectos literarios y los politicos; alli donde la construccion de la nacion y la cultura nacional se enfrentan a la politica exterior para la que cualquier modelo alternativo puede ser una amenaza. En ese punto comienza el libro: 1826 y la convocatoria de Simon Bolivar al Congreso de Panama, para analizar las tres decadas siguientes en las que se termina de consolidar un modelo hemisferico marcado por multiples negociaciones, por disimetrias y por una dependencia-tan forzosa como rechazada-de la permeabilidad de las relaciones que la modernidad habilita. Y esa reflexion se asienta en las fronteras, no solo fisicas sino tambien en aquellas donde se intercambia lo simbolico; en el acarreo de aquello que las negociaciones coloniales han dejado al descubierto: tipos humanos, naturaleza, historias y tradiciones, e ideologias. Los habitantes de esta esfera publica son los letrados, que en ese momento se estan constituyendo como intelectuales nacionales.La hipotesis del libro es fuerte: Brickhouse hara un trazado de las genealogias hemisfericas pues ". . . the formation of the American Renaissance that continues to organize so many literary-historiographical narratives of the nineteenth-century United States, whether through reinscription or multiculturalist revision, might more accurately be reconfigured as a transamerican renaissance, a period of literary border crossing, intercontinental exchange, and complex political implications whose unfamiliar genealogies we are just beginning to discern" (8). Es su hipotesis y su materia: los treinta anos que siguen a 1826 y la consolidacion de una elite letrada que en Estados Unidos produce las narrativas de la nacion. Esas narrativas estarian tramadas por los intercambios hemisfericos y los detallados recorridos por las publicaciones de esos anos confirman sus argumentes: "The years leading up to the Congress of Panama witnessed the emergence of the first internationally recognized authors from the United States as well as an initial burgeoning of hemispheric thought within the national imagination" (2).El libro comienza con los planteos acerca de una literatura nacional recogidos en la North American Review que Brickhouse describe asi: "urbane authors and editors fluent in numerous languages publish in only one; indigenous traditions lovingly admired for their "rich" originality furnish no more than occasions for nostalgia; and the slaveholding economies that undergird the public sphere of cultural productions are reduced to the level of metaphor" (17). Las transacciones discursivas que se intensifican en el periodo hacen que rapidamente se cree una dinamica por la cual las zonas mas conflictivas de la experiencia politica se reconfiguren a traves de operaciones de desplazamiento: establecerse en el pais vecino para opinar sobre cuestiones que implican a la politica local, o ficcionalizar el pasado indigena o colonial "en otra parte" o con los materiales de otras culturas. Se trata, sin duda, de un problema moderno, el de la propiedad. El reclamo de ser "originales" en un mundo que vive de las transacciones confronto a las nacientes culturas nacionales de America despues de la Independencia. La relacion con Europa fue el problema explicito en las discusiones y ha sido lo que la critica tomo como eje de las reflexiones sobre los procesos de independencia. …

Death in Fifteenth-Century Castile: Ideologies of the Elites (review)

Abstract: VIVANCO, LAURA. Death in Fifteenth-Century Castile: Ideologies of the Elites. London: Tamesis, 2004. 211 pages.The subject of death and its perception, the rituals both secular and religious surrounding it, and the artistic elaborations on the topic have been the focus of numerous studies, especially in the past few decades. Perhaps such a trend falls within the field of influence of what Paul Freedman and Gabrielle Spiegel saw as a consequence within American medieval historiography of a "postmodern agenda," which determined from the 19705 onward an emphasis on the marginal and particularly on the grotesque (Freedman and Spiegel, 699, see note 73 to same page).1 Laura Vivanco's study is not within American medievalism proper, does not concern herself exclusively with historical sources, and specifically distances itself from the macabre and the grotesque (23). A theoretical framework, which postmodernism has given to most of those other studies referred to by Freedman and Spiegel, would have been here a welcome structuring device for what is otherwise an exhaustive collection of quotations from various sources on different aspects surrounding death in the fifteenth century.The book is divided into three chapters, "Types of Death," "The Afterlife," and "The Bereaved," framed by an introduction and a conclusion. Vivanco's focus is on the differences and possible conflicts arising from views and attitudes of oradores and defensores. Each chapter provides a wealth of materials for each estate. The strength of this book is precisely the number of sources brought together under specific rubrics, confirmed by the impressive bibliography (particularly for the primary sources). Beyond the extraordinary labor of compilation, for which the author should be commended, the book, however, does not fully justify its being presented as a unified work-aside from suffering from a series of minor problems as well.In the Introduction, Vivanco reviews all the literature produced on the subject of death-with emphasis on the work of historians-for the Middle Ages in general, and for Spain in particular. The author also focuses on particular regions and with different source materials, argued as a response to Johan Huizinga's suturing of the theme of death and the fifteenth century as part of his argument on the waning epoch. Vivanco surveys such literature arguing that it was first produced under the influence of Huizinga, but later took on the task, as numerous historians felt the need to nuance and, at times, to contradict Huzinga-of emphasizing continuity in the practices and attitude towards death both before and after the fifteenth century. Vivanco cites primary and secondary sources that support and contest a particular emphasis on death in the fifteenth-century (1-7), to support these claims. The author goes on to explain that the subject has been the focus of general studies, as well as of specific topics, and cites those devoted to medieval Castile: three different wide-ranging studies on death in late-medieval Castile, along with a series of more specialized works on topics such as the deaths of kings. Beyond these historical approaches, only some of which consider literature as source material, Vivanco provides a review of critical works devoted to death in art and literature, focusing on pieces such as the Damas de la miterte and the Ars moriendi, along with the privileged focus on a play such as Celestina or even on a particular character, such as Leriano in Carcel de amor (8-10). After this, it is hard to take Vivanco's word when she claims that "there is still a need for a study that focuses on a single century and uses evidence provided by literary and other written sources" (10). …

Liturgia, poesía y teatro en la Edad Media: Estudios sobre prácticas culturales y literarias (review)

Abstract: Nunca un libro de Pedro M. Cátedra deja indiferente a los interesados en la literatura y la cultura de la Edad Media y el Renacimiento hispánicos, y el que se reseña aquı́ no es una excepción. Su propósito, parafraseando palabras del autor (10), es llevar a cabo un ejercicio de restauración de un sistema literario de la Edad Media, sistema literario circunscrito a un cronotopo humano y cultural determinado (el de ciertos cı́rculos monásticos femeninos castellanos a fines de la Edad Media), y que tiene como elemento central ciertas prácticas lectoras y poéticas vinculadas con la liturgia, y que, por sus ribetes performativos, pican en el terreno de lo parateatral. Todo ello explorando un terreno de naturaleza no obviamente literaria, pero obteniendo unas conclusiones que sin duda mejoran nuestro conocimiento de las prácticas y mecanismos literarios del—por recaer en el cliché— otoño de la Edad Media castellana. Y es que, por decirlo con palabras del propio Cátedra, ‘‘hay, a veces, que andar caminos no demasiado literarios para llegar a la literatura o, mejor dicho, a la práctica y al uso de la literatura’’ (159). La primera de las cuatro partes del libro, ‘‘Lectura y liturgia’’ (31–167), discurre por senderos familiares para aquellos que ya conocen las principales lı́neas de investigación de Cátedra; me refiero a la asociada con la prospección sobre la historia y caracterı́sticas de la lectura femenina, y más concretamente a aquella realizada en el claustro, sobre la que la labor de nuestro autor ha rendido últimamente frutos notables. Esta primera parte consta a su vez de dos: en la primera, ‘‘Vida, lectura y trasfondo intelectual’’ (31–126) Cátedra acota y escudriña el ‘‘entramado monástico’’—ası́ lo denomina, y queda definido (31–51) por sus conexiones nobiliarias y por su impulso observante—femenino bajomedieval castellano, que resulta ser el trasfondo intelectual en el que se localizan y arraigan determinadas prácticas

Lenguas e identidades en los Andes: perspectivas ideológicas y culturales (review)

Abstract: CORONEL-MOLINA, SERAFIN M. AND LINDA L. GRABNER-CORONEL. Lenguos e identidades en los Andes: perspectivas ideologicas y cultureles. Quito: Abya Yala, 2005. 426 pages.Lengtias e iticntuiades en los Amies: perspectivas ideologicas y culturales is a welcome addition to the growing literature on the complex relationships between language, social identity, and educational policies in the Andean region. It is divided into three sections: Language Maintenance, Ideology and Identities, and Deconstructing Socio-Cultural Identities.The first section, on language maintenance, covers a wide variety of topics ranging from Comajoan's contribution on the application of Fishman's model of inter-generational transmission to Quechua in Peru1 to a proposal by Coronel-Molina that views digital media as a forum that offers great potential for the revitalisation of Quechua and Aymara. Other contributions in this section include a proposal by Zuniga, Cano, and Galvez to develop educational policies on language and culture that incorporate the input of regional authorities, grass-root organizations, teachers, and community members in rural and indigenous Andean areas in Peru; an overview of the sociolinguistic status of Quichua in the Argentinian Northeast by Alharracin and Alderetes; and a contemporary view of the attempts by the newspaper "EL Lapiz" to construct a multilingual and multicultural identity for Venezuela in the nineteenth century. The common thread that runs across this section is the continuous search for social spaces for indigenous languages in the Andean region. While in countries such as Bolivia, Ecuador, and Peru the Quechua languages have gained some terrain in the arena ot educational policy, the situation of Quichua in the Argentinian northeast described by Albarracin and Alderetes, and also confirmed by language changes experienced by the northeastern varieties,- is illustrative of a generalized lack of institutional support from the educational authorities throughout the region. There is a lack of interest in the inclusion of the varieties of Quichua spoken in the provinces of Jujuy, Tucuman, and Salta in the educational system and very limited interest in the provinces of Santiago del Estero, Catamarca, and La Rioja. This is so even in the province of Tucuman, where a community of immigrant Bolivian Quechua speakers keeps the language alive in the region through the transmission of radio programs in the area.The degree of variation in the situations described by the authors in this section is indicative of the different challenges that maintenance and revitalisation have historically faced and continue to face in Andean societies. Avendano's piece on Febres Corderos's attempts to incorporate some aspects of the now-extinct indigenous languages of Merida in Venezuela as part of the construction of national identity illustrates the early efforts that were made in the region to preserve indigenous languages. These efforts were not always successful, as the example of indigenous languages in Merida illustrates; but in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, new possibilities have emerged for revitalization that are grounded in the actual participation of indigenous communities in the elaboration of language and culture policies. In contrast to the grim picture for the survival of Quichua in the Argentinian northeast outlined by Alharracin and Alderete's paper, Comajoan's and Zuniga, Cano, and Galvez's reports contain proposals to further strengthen the maintenance of indigenous languages in Peru. Of theoretical relevance for the field of language maintenance is Comajoan's discussion of the relative weight that intergenerational transmission and educational policies have in the revitalization of indigenous languages. Although he recognizes the valuable effects of educational policies that foster the development of indigenous languages, he also points out that they must be accompanied by language policies that affect other aspects of social and communal life as well. …