Showing papers in "Hispanic Review in 2010"

Writing on Behalf of a Christian Empire: Gifts, Dissimulation, and Politics in the Letters of Philip II of Spain to Wanli of China

Abstract: It is no secret that China has long captured the Western imagination. In the Middle Ages, Prester lohn, Marco Polo, and lohn Mandeville were reputed to be the first Europeans to foray into the legendary Cathay. In the sixteenth century, China became a most attractive destination for many Iberian missionaries and adventurers. Both Francisco Xavier and Juan de Zumarraga were keen to enter China. In a moment of crisis, a dedicated cleric in the Americas such as Bartolome de las Casas also considered leaving New Spain for Asia. In 1572, in order to enter the land of the Chinese, fray Agustin de Alburquerque tried without success to offer himself as a slave to the Chinese merchants in Manila (San Agustin 368; Grijalva 320-21). Philip II of Spain likewise was possessed by this enthusiasm. Consistent with his imperial vision, the Spanish monarch attempted to gain control over the Asian world by pursuing diplomatic ties with the Celestial Empire.1 On two different occasions (in 1580 and 1581) he tried to establish direct communication with Wanli, the emperor of the Ming dynasty.The political and historical circumstances in which Philip II decided to send his embassies, and the significance and function of his letters to the king of China, are the themes of this essay. This article focuses on the ways in which the Spanish monarch uses the art of dissimulation as effective statecraft in pursuit of political, commercial, and evangelical interests in China. It argues that the Prudent King's application of the dissimulation principle to a deferential tone follows the recommendations of Pedro de Ribadeneyra's treatise on Christian kingship. Beneath the deferential rhetoric, one can recognize the same sort of Christian superiority and political ambition that are evident in earlier documents, mainly Charles V's letter in 1543 and the Requerimiento. Interweaving pragmatic prudence with Christian superiority, the Prudent King's letters represent the epitome of the prevailing ambivalence that defines a large body of European writings on China during the early modern period.IThe Prudent King enacted his Asia agenda as early as 1564, when he first appointed Miguel Lopez de Legazpi to discover a successful "tornaviaje" across the Pacific Ocean (from Manila to Acapulco) and to found a Spanish settlement in the Philippines ("Instruccion que se dio por el presidente y oydores de la Real Audiencia de Mejico a Miguel Lopez de Legazpi" 170). Like many Spaniards of his time, Philip II believed that the Pacific archipelago would conveniently serve as a springboard to the great kingdom of China (Morga 217-19; Grijalva 295 ).2 In fact, shortly after Legazpi's occupation of Manila, Philip put forward a China mission that soon became the center of heated discussions among Spaniards inquiring into the best way to enter China (Boxer, "Portuguese and Spanish Projects" 133). 3 The first official encounter between the Spaniards and the Chinese nevertheless did not occur until 1574, when the Chinese pirate Limahon and his crew attacked Manila.Spanish soldiers had successfully besieged the Chinese invaders at the mouth of the Agno River in Lingayen when Admiral Wan Kao (also known as Homocon by the Spaniards) arrived at Manila in pursuit of the pirates. Philippine governor Guido de Lavezares promised the Chinese captain to hand over the pirate chief when captured.4 In recognition of this friendly gesture of cooperation from the Spaniards, Wan Kao resolved to return to China and suggested that some clerics and soldiers accompany him on his return journey. In agreement, Lavezares dispatched two Augustinian emissaries, Martin de Rada and leronimo Marin, on behalf of Philip II of Spain to the governor of Fukien.5 The embassy was successfully concluded in 1576, when the representatives returned to Manila with an escort of Chinese soldiers and gifts.6Encouraged by the news, Philip decided to take the matter in hand. In 1580, he dispatched a trio of Augustinian friars, luan Gonzalez de Mendoza, Jeronimo Marin, and Francisco de Ortega, to the king of China, along with a letter and many gifts ("Consulta del Consejo de Indias sobre noticias de China"). …

Pituso en blackface: una mascarada racial en Fortunata y Jacinta

Abstract: This article analyzes the function of blackface in the "falso Pituso" episode of Benito Perez Galdos' Fortunata y Jacinta The representation of the false heir of Spain's new dominant class serves as a point ofo departure for this paper's analysis of how the novel explores the significance of race at the end of the nineteenth century, on the eve of the loss of Spain's colonies, while also addressing its characterization of the bourgeoisie as white and European, its racilization of the working class and the poor (the Fourth Estate) and the problem of conceptualizing an ambiguous Spanish race

Ser social y poética material en la obra de Antón de Montoro, mediano converso

Abstract: Converso poet Anton de Montoro creates a material poetics based on a subtle positioning that reveals his contact with urban oligarchies, a middle class of artisans and merchants, and courtly bureaucrats. Through an intense poetic activity, Montoro negotiates his converso identity and middle status with several interlocutors that return to him a stigmatized image that disqualifies him for poetic practice. The result is an affirmation of the self as social being that sustains and justifies the material quality of poetry.

From the Space of the Wunderkammer to Macondo's Wonder Rooms: The Collection of Marvels in Cien años de soledad

Abstract: This article explores the relationship of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's novel Cien ans de soledad to early modern material culture. In particular, it argues that we may reread central passages in the novel as a ludic reintegration of the space of the camara de maravillas or Wunderkammer : sixteenth- and seventeenth-century repositories of objects that were conceived of as marvels or wonders. While this transhistorical relationship appears at first to link Garcia Marquez's novel to modern and contemporary reinventions of the Wunderkammer in Europe and North America, the present article underscores the specificity of Cien anos de soledad 's approach to the early modern culture of the marvelous in light of the novel's retracing of the affective cartographies of empire.

A Portrait of the Present: Sergio Chejfec's Photographic Realism

Abstract: Juro que este Hvro e fato serti palavras. E urna fotografia muda. Este livro e um silencio.- Clarice Lispector... e/ relato es algo que requiere ser visto y despues leido.. . . quiza no postule el futuro sino bajo la forma como se vera nuestro presente cuando le toque ser pasado.- Sergio ChejfecThe demand to represent the present has been one of the central problems of realism since the nineteenth century. The dictum "Il faut etre de son temps" was the motto of the group that formed around Courbet, and it was quickly adapted to the literary field to characterize this aesthetic current. In recent years, in the Latin American context, the realist ambition to represent contemporary life has returned with considerable force. After a certain impasse in the avant-garde movements, caused in part by a sensation of monotony generated through the repetition of experimental techniques, recent decades offer a plethora of texts that build verisimilar worlds, and present clear, legible prose and classic realist themes. In general, these themes could be described as a new type of miserabilisme, to borrow the term the French applied during the rise of naturalism, that is, a narrative marked by the presence of certain low and dark aspects of humanity and society, aspects that foreground a kind of bestiality or savageness.In fact, the concept of "New Realisms" has been circulating in the field for some decades. From special issues of academic journals dedicated to new realisms, to pieces in mass circulation newspapers and literary magazines, to the publication of articles that analyze cultural manifestations in particular national contexts, a new trend of reflection has eliminated a certain demode air that realism had acquired from the 1960s on; realism has returned to scholarly and cultural agendas.1 In the particular case of Argentinean literature, since the 1990s, as the social crisis has become more pronounced, a series of texts have appeared that adopt a realist aesthetic in the effort to expose a growing marginality and to show the city as a degraded, dirty, and ruined space.2With this development, not only is realism renewed, but so are the discussions and polemics that have accompanied it since the nineteenth century. While some discussion has been centered in moral arguments or in the artistic quality of the works, other criticism has put into question the way in which marginal subjectivities are treated in a work of art: Do we see a stereotypical, exotic, or costumbrista construction? Are we talking about a pedagogical or moral literature? Or is this a literature that presents "other" ways of treating political themes?3It is within the context of such a return to a realist aesthetic that this essay is situated. However, I focus on a particular return to realism that incorporates avant-garde techniques within a narrative that displays elements of traditional realist narrative. Of course, it is always difficult to talk about aesthetic innovation, and, especially, a "return" to an aesthetic current such as realism, since there have always been examples of this aesthetic in the history of literature (and of Latin American literature).4 In fact, one reason why realism has changed throughout history is related to the push to be contemporary. A double exigency operates in the idea of making a "portrait of the present": it has to say something about the present, to have contemporary topics, but it also needs to be a mode of representation that is adequate for the present moment. If we consider that each epoch has its own modes of representation, many of the characteristics of realism as it was understood from the nineteenth century and throughout the twentieth would have to be modified today.5 The narrative practice of the Argentinean writer Sergio Chejfec presents an ideal case for thinking about these problems. His writing displays a clear interest in classic realist themes while also incorporating avant-garde techniques. …

Kafka en Argentina

Abstract: This article deals with the initial critical reception of the work of Franz Kafka in Argentina by focusing on articles and reviews published in Sur and on essays by Jorge Luis Borges and Ezequiel Martinez Estrada that appeared in other publications. By looking at a significant emergence of animal imaginaries and a search for a new mode of appropriation of the fable and the bestiary traditions, the analysis traces the literary effects that such readings had on Argentine short-story writing in the 1950s. The texts analyzed in this article belong to Bestiario by Julio Cortazr, Mundo animal by Antonio Di Benedetto, and La furia and Las invitadas by Silvina Ocampo.

The Legacies of Pere Portabella: Between Heritage and Inheritance

Abstract: For Tatjana GajicWhat follows is an attempt to map out a theoretical approach to continuities and discontinuities in the work of Pere Portabella. My argument seeks to critique the obsessive preoccupation with origin or essence, particularly that of national origin, that has plagued writing on Spanish film in order to engage with the politics of signification and virtuality. More specifically though, the broad surveying sweep of this article - from 1970 to 2009 - focuses on the split, the caesura, that emerges in Portabella's cinema between cultural heritage and genealogy as manifested in the poetics of the political image. To this end, I want first to discuss the variety of ways in which representation comes to be interrogated in his films before going on, in the second half of this essay, to address the question of space.I would like to begin with a brief discussion of a couple of sequences from two films that Pere Portabella directed in the early 1970s. The first is from the 1973 film Accio Santos. In this twelve-minute short, Portabella's longtime collaborator, composer, performance artist, and virtuoso pianist Carles Santos prepares to play Chopin's Prelude Opus 45 in C sharp minor. The camera records him surrounded by the team of lighting and sound technicians as he warms up his fingers before playing the piece. At what is almost exactly the midway point in the film Santos stops playing and moves to an adjacent table. The musician then listens (with us, the spectators) to the recording; after a few moments he places earphones over his head to listen alone and in silence. The camera moves slowly towards him, stopping in extreme close-up to focus on his facial expression, his eyebrows, the movement of the reel of tape reflected in his spectacles. His eyes, fixed on the tape machine, fill the frame marked, in turn, by the outline of his glasses in what might be described as a soundscape, the sight of sound. As the camera closes in further, the only movement in the frame is that of the reel turning in Santos's retina. It is an ontologically filmic moment, a conceit of kinetic reproduction in which the cinematic eye meets the human eye to reproduce silence in visual form: both an acoustic image and an image of the acoustic.The second example is linked to this. The opening sequence of Umbracle (1972) commences almost like a film from the silent era: the grainy texture of the celluloid, the stark mise en scene. Actor Christopher Lee and the security guard of the Zoological Museum in Barcelona's Parc de la Ciutadella, encircle one another. Gliding between the glass cabinets of stuffed birds, the two men mark out a mysterious choreography of surveillance as they feign close examination of the taxidermie specimens while eyeing one another with suspicion through the blurred glass of the vitrines, a glass that shimmers beneath the translucent Umbraculum. Meanwhile the audio track resounds with an increasingly intense, insistent choral humming, like the angry buzz of a fly (something to which I will return later). As is always the case in the work of Portabella, the actors are not characters as such: they have no depth, no psychology. Rather, they are oblique signifiers that point us in particular directions. Lee, associated with the Dracula of Hammer Horror films, had appeared in Portabella's previous film Vampir-cuadecuc (1970), and is a figure synonymous with Nosferatu, the word Bram Stoker erroneously believed was Rumanian for "not dead." Lee is thus a representation of the "truly" undead among the apparently undead, a Dracula among the stuffed, lifelike animals. Furthermore, though, Lee is an actor who is also not an actor (in this film he plays a person called Christopher Lee), a shadow of his own character who, unsettlingly, by being himself is less real than the character he habitually plays. He is what Jacques Derrida might call, in a rather different context, a "copy of a copy" (Dissemination 219). He is also a leftover from the earlier film (which itself was, as we will see, a reworking of previous filmic material). …

Impossible narratives: the Barcelona School and the European avant-gardes

Abstract: This article investigates the Barcelona School related to European leftist cultures of the 1960s, and in particular the intersection of critical theory with the political avant-gardes. Although the School's films seldom left Spain, the movement offers a crucial exemplar of the European avant-gardes' aesthetic and political impurity. The Barcelona School certainly lacks stylistic cohesion, but it has also been criticized as apolitical. This article argues that the School demonstrates an essential aspect of the European avant-gardes: by promiscuously combining forms, it speaks to (and from) the contested territories of European film culture. Theoretical debates on Marxism and culture linked the project of engaged cinema to the contested direction of the European left. And avant-gardist forms mixed uneasily with art cinema, exploitation genres and the global claims of Third Cinema. It is this rich mulch that accounts for the incoherence but also the complexity of the European avant-gardes. With its many international and multicultural links, the Barcelona School demonstrates the importance of the transnational to any understanding of European avant-garde film cultures.

Sex, Flippancy, Autobiography: Existential Palliatives in Valle-Inclán's Sonatas

Abstract: Ramon del Valle-Inclan's four Sonatas have attracted a good deal of critical attention, but there is nothing approaching a consensus as to their thematic import. Opinions range from seeing the narratives as an expression of Decadentism and as a parody of that same movement. Likewise, they have been read as aestheticist, amoral, and apolitical, but also as socially, politically, and ethically engaged in a distinctly "noventayochista" vein.1 One of the most obvious obstacles to interpretation is the tone of the text: it is far from clear to what extent the reader should take it at face value and to what extent as tongue-in-cheek. What I shall propose here is that the seriousness and the levity are not mutually exclusive; indeed, they need to be taken in conjunction as the two basic components of a dynamic that manifests itself in Bradomin's psyche and which is, ultimately, the fundamental theme of the sequence of novels. I also hope to demonstrate how the Sonata de invierno - critically, the most neglected of the four - plays a crucial role in this line of interpretation.The starting point for my argument is the hypothesis that the Marques has no religious faith and that, as a result, he goes through life with a deeprooted and disquieting sense of his own mortality, one which reaches its peak at the moment, in his advanced years, when he sits down to write his memoirs. This aspect of his character is not one that figures in most commentators' accounts of how they view Xavier, but neither is it entirely unheard of in previous criticism. To date, Henry Thurston-Griswold has provided the most thorough-going study of such a "cosmovision tragica" (98), though he does not pursue all the implications of his findings.2 He acknowledges his debt to German Gullon, who writes of Sonata de otono that "el hombre se situa en los limites vitales propios, sin que la mano de Dios acuda benevolamente a calmar los sufrimientos el pecado original resulta irredento, y su penitencia se pagara en la vida de la tierra, en el sentimiento tragico de la vida de cada cual" (164), and also that the plot of this Sonata entails "el presentimiento primero y ... la realidad luego del descubrimiento de la conciencia angustiada y tragica del hombre, ante la vida en la encrucijada de la mortalidad" (166).3 That the protagonist of four novels published from 1902 to 1905 by a relatively young and unconventional author should find himself in such an existential predicament is certainly not implausible, given the significant, cumulative impact that Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Kierkegaard, among others, had made in Spain toward the end of the nineteenth century.4While Bradomin is clearly subject to these intimations of human transience, he has also developed - to what extent consciously or unconsciously, it is impossible to say - a series of stratagems that allow him to deny, forget, mitigate, fend off, devalue, or defuse them. In my title I have grouped the principal methods under three broad categories: sex, flippancy, and - in old age - autobiography, and some combination of them is deployed almost constantly. That they are relatively - but only relatively - successful in damping down his thoughts and feelings about this central unsettling preoccupation or in channeling them away from it, is demonstrated in the parallel fact that most readers have not seen through these palliatives and diversionary tactics, and have hence been directed into other approaches to reading the Sonatas and toward other opinions about Xavier's underlying psychological makeup.Mortality, or the imminent threat of mortality, is to be found at just about every turn in the plots of the Sonatas (A. Alonso 208). Primavera opens under distinctly grim circumstances: Bishop Estefano Gaetani is at death's door. His last rites, his demise, an overnight vigil, the funeral procession, and the burial service occupy well over the first third of the novel. This death comes only a year after that of Estefano's brother, Filipo, and also coincides, more or less, with the beginning of Holy Week - the Easter processions of brotherhoods with floats depicting Christ's Passion start soon afterwards. …

Macunaíma: entre a crítica e o elogio à transculturação

Abstract: A fascinating contradiction lies in the center of Macunaima. The hero of Mario de Andrade's novel has an incredible ability to refashion himself, to mingle with other cultures and to wear different social masks in order to achieve his goals. Such transcultural skills, however, don't seem to work in Macunaima's favor, since the hero fails miserably to forge his self. In this article, I discuss what kind of consequences can be drawn from this paradox. It is my contention that the novel is comprised of an appraisal and a critique of Antropofagia. The novel exhibits features that both laud Brazilian hybridity and examine critically the ends of that transcultural process. I also contend that the novel envisions another kind of hybridity for Brazilian culture—a subaltern hybridity, which valorizes the cultural exchanges among countries within the Southern Hemisphere. The novel thereby lays out a critical theory of hybridity in which actual configurations of hybridity can be criticized from the standpoint of an imaginative and alternative hybridity.

Cultivating Madrid: Public Space and Middle-Class Culture in the Spanish Capital, 1833–1890 (review)

Abstract: FROST, DANIEL. Cultivating Madrid: Public Space and Middle-Class Culture in the Spanish Capital, 1833-1890. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell UP, 2008. 225 pp.Reading Daniel Frost's Cultivating Madrid is like taking a walk in a carefully tended garden. The approach and the topic are refreshing. The overall project is well planned and cared for in a way that reveals the originality of the author's particular vision. Most notably, it is full of simultaneously elegant and precise phrases that make the putting together of ideas and arguments in the reader's head a truly engaging and enjoyable experience. More substantially, this book raises some interesting and important questions about the ability of literary scholars to interpret the representation of urban space. Assumptions about words, images, land, and geography change in the nineteenth century, and there follow accompanying changes in urban space and its relationship to nature. One of the most important contributions of Cultivating Madrid is its discussion of the role of language in the understanding of the connections between landscape and human perception. As Frost makes clear in the introduction, "Much of the history of landscape and literature suggests that writing about nature is rooted in the idea of perceiving the land from a subjective standpoint, not only etymologically, but also epistemologically" (15). Specifically, the study offers some compelling ideas about how representations of public parks and landscapes play a reciprocal role in attempts to think of Madrid as a modern capital. During the nineteenth century, Madrid was looking for a way to create something that in effect does not exist: a stable middle-class culture to serve as a model for the nation as a whole. The book begins with a complex but convincing reading of how both the costumbrista writing and urban design treatises of Ramon de Mesonero Romanos provide a vision of Madrid during a time of rapid change (specifically, in the years following the death of the absolute monarch Fernando VII). Paradoxically, Mesonero's costumbrismo looked to the past to conserve local spaces and traditions that were being lost or overshadowed, while his design treatises looked toward the future and outside of Spain for inspiration. A focus on landscape brings a new understanding to this apparent contradiction. Complementing this reading, a subsequent chapter uses the work of Mariano Jose de Larra during the period 1833-1836 to examine the imposition of behaviors in the spaces of middle-class social Ufe that before the death of the monarch had been strictly defined but were quickly shifting. Frost argues that Larra sees parks as a way of imposing a liberal civility on a newly emerging middle- class in Madrid.After theoretically and historically positioning Cultivating Madrid on the foundation of these first two chapters based on careful readings of the work of Mesonero and Larra from the 1830s, the book could have taken any number of directions. Frost takes his definition of public space, modern capitalist urban development, and language from the first part of the book into a subsequent discussion of a selection of urban novels of the 1880s and early 1890s. The main focus is the treatment of gardens and cultivated public spaces in novels by Benito Galdos, Emilia Pardo Bazan, and Armando Palacio Valdes, in which the green spaces of the city hold an illusory promise of escape from the newly defined "laws" of civilized middle-class society. …

La diáspora cubana en México: terceros espacios y miradas excéntricas (review)

Abstract: The Latin American tradition of the writer as a seriously regarded political voice could be another nexus of analysis. In an unpublished manuscript written in the 1970s, the Chicano novelist Arturo Islas complained precisely about the influence on Chicano literature of this Latin American expectation that writers should always see themselves ‘‘in relation to and as an indissoluble part of society’’ (qtd. in Padilla, ‘‘Felix beyond the Closet: Sexuality, Masculinity, and Relations of Power in Arturo Islas’s The Rain God,’’ Aztlán: A Journal of Chicana Studies 34.2 [2009]: 11–34). For him, the mandate that writers produce work of imaginative force and of relevance to the community was stifling, but many of the most prominent Chicana writers—including Cisneros, Viramontes, Cherrı́e Moraga, and Gloria Anzaldúa— have embraced this dual role. One could say the same about Mexican authors such as Rosario Castellanos and Elena Poniatowska. For them, producing a politically engaged and effective literature means linking issues of identity and subjectivity to an examination of the relationship between the self and community. Yet they guard against the romanticization of notions of ‘‘community,’’ often providing vehement critiques of such formations at the same time that they try to imagine alternative possibilities. These are simply preliminary musings about what a critical framework for the analysis of Mexicana and Chicana writings might look like. While the idea of any single totalizing theory of these literatures is not feasible, one could imagine marking affinities in various strains of writing among these women. I eagerly await future research bringing together the kinds of literary insights offered by Toward a Latina Feminism of the Americas with the social and discursive transnational analyses of books such as Rosa Linda Fregoso’s MeXicana Encounters: The Making of Social Identities on the Borderlands (Berkeley: U of California P, 2003) and Alicia R. Schmidt Camacho’s Migrant Imaginaries: Latino Cultural Politics in the U.S.– Mexico Borderlands (New York: New York UP, 2008).

Editor's Preface. The Invisible Tradition: Avant-Garde Catalan Cinema under Late Francoism

Abstract: Political cinema is about the absence of the people. This paraphrase of Gilles Deleuze could serve as an epigraph to this volume.' Avant-garde Catalan cinema thematizes not just the lack of visibility of a people but, more significantly, makes of such absence and silence a powerful cinematic trope with which to counteract the political vacuum created by late Francoism. The essays collected in The Invisible Tradition present instances of an urgent critical reengagement and symptomatic reading of these singular and littleknown cinematic interventions.The social and political imaginaries of Francoist Spain created a singular instance of dislocation in the Catalan filmic avant-garde of the 1960s and 1970s. The commitment to avant-garde practices, emerging out of a tradition dating back to the 1920s in the Catalan context, pushed the envelope of political possibility by establishing an elective affinity and an affective transfer between the political and the aesthetic. By addressing this productive double enunciation through a transnational lens, this special issue hopes to shed new light both on European peripheral cinematic avant-gardes and on the aesthetic articulation of political dissent. The films of the Barcelona School and of Pere Portabella bear the mark of their circumstances and put those circumstances to work by appropriating them conceptually and cinematically. Late Francoism proved to be an unstable and complex political conjuncture that challenged the use of straightforward cinematic narratives and called for a reimagination of the cinematic medium as an emancipatory practice.The conjunctures of Barcelona's cultural milieu were not without complexity either. Felix Fanes - whose contribution is the first article in Catalan to be published in Hispanic Review - teases out the implications of Pere Portabella's collaborative, interdisciplinary, and conceptual understanding of the cinematic medium by paying close attention to the legacies of the prewar Catalan avant-garde, still traceable in the Barcelona of the '60s and '70s. By foregrounding the centrality of Joan Brossa, a poet, visual artist, magician, and early-cinema aficionado, as a link between the historical avant-gardes and the emergence of Catalan conceptualism, Fanes situates his early collaboration with Portabella within a genealogy that begins with Miro, runs through Dau al Set, and culminates with the avant-garde politics of the Grup de Treball. Likewise, the influence of the avant-garde musician and conceptual artist Carles Santos brings to the table an emphasis on the materiality and discontinuity of film, together with a fascination with the role of labor in the artistic process, which we have come to regard as intrinsic to Portabella's distinctive filmic style. Dialogue, collaboration, and mixed media may have begun as characteristics of the Catalan avant-garde milieu, but in Portabella they were formalized into aesthetic choices.Rosalind Gait pushes the contextualization of the Barcelona School further by situating it within a transnational dialogue between critical theory and the political avant-garde, in its turn immersed in the aesthetic and political debates surrounding the events of 1968. The reconfiguration of an alternative cinematic culture would champion linguistic renewal over party alliances, and oppose both the legacy of neorealism and the hegemony of the NCE (Nuevo Cine Espanol) in favor of an elective affinity with the Italian Gruppo 63 and, to a lesser extent, the French Tel Quel. Thus the political impurity and the transnational conversations in which these films engage belie the isolationism of the Francoist cultural milieu, where being Spanish fundamentally meant not being European. Gait's research inextricably links the fate of European leftist cultures to the ascendancy of a critical theory that, via Roland Barthes and Umberto Eco for instance, championed a transformation of art cinema, and to which the filmmakers of the Barcelona School fully subscribed. …

The Return of the Moor: Spanish Responses to Contemporary Moroccan Immigration (review)

Abstract: FLESLER, Daniela. The Return of the Moor: Spanish Responses to Contemporary Moroccan Immigration. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue UP, 2008. viii + 246 pp.With The Return of the Moor, Daniela Flesler has written the foundational text of contemporary Spanish immigration studies, particularly regarding how Spaniards negotiate past and present representations of Moroccan immigrants. This is thoroughly researched, convincingly argued, groundbreaking scholarship that dialogues comfortably with current trends in Hispanism and those in colonial, postcolonial, and early modern and contemporary race studies. In this remarkable book, Flesler argues that there is a relation between how contemporary Spaniards imagine and relate to the waves of North African migrations from 711 to the seventeenth century and how they deal with their current relation to economic immigrants from Morocco. Having conflated all Muslim and North African migrants into the conveniently flattened category of the menacing, invading "Moor," Spaniards justify their rejection of contemporary Moroccans and Muslim immigrants by appealing to an imaginary construction of their perceived radical, irreconcilable cultural differences from the "new" Spain fully integrated into the European Union and functioning as the guardian of the infelicitously called "fortressEurope." These supposed differences must be emphasized because, of all the groups of contemporary immigrants looking for work and a better life in the Peninsula, Moroccans "are the one group most directly implicated in the question of Spanish identity in relationship to Africa" (3). Spaniards see Moroccans not as guests that must be welcomed, but as the former medieval hosts that were driven from their land and "who have come to reclaim what was theirs" (3). Looked at from this perspective and taking into consideration the many phenotypical similarities between North Africans and Spaniards, "Moroccans turn into a 'problem' . . . not because of their cultural differences, . . . but because . . . they are not different enough" (3; Flesler's emphasis).The book is divided into five chapters, with an extensive introduction and a short but very helpful conclusion. Chaper 1, "Difference Within and Without: Negotiating European, National, and Regional Identities in Spain," argues that, in joining the European Economic Community in 1986, Spain gained economic, political, and psychological advantages. Spain could stop thinking of itself as one of Europe's "others" to become, instead, an equal partner in the European modernization project. In this sense, immigration from Morocco reaffirms how Spain belongs to Europe at the same time that it highlights the internal contradictions, tensions, and ruptures of Spanish racial formation (11). The most compelling aspect of this chapter is its second part, where Flesler analyzes "the intersection of immigration debates and the politics of national and regional identities, in the context of the 'Europe of Regions'" (11). She teases out the complex anxieties that Catalonia, for example, experiences when negotiating the presence of new immigrants who must choose whether to learn Catalan or Spanish, thus emphasizing Catalonia's own difficulties in shaping its cultural identity vis-a-vis the Spanish State.Chapter 2, "Ghostly Returns: The 'Loss' of Spain, the Invading 'Moor,' and the Contemporary Moroccan Immigrant," traces the transformation of the contemporary Moroccan immigrant "into the threatening figure of the medieval (male) Moorish invader" (12). Effectively dialoguing with current "hauntology" studies about Spain's repressed historical memories (Jo Labanyi, Joan Ramon Resina) influenced by Jacques Derrida's Specters of Marx, Flesler demonstrates how "the figure of the 'Moor' continues to haunt the Spanish imaginary, producing slippages between past and present and textually constructing Moroccans as Moorish ghosts" (12). Flesler's best contribution in this chapter is how, through painstaking literary and historical research, she separates myth from textual fact in mapping the many rewritings of the foundational stories of Don Rodrigo, Count Julian and his daughter La Cava Florinda, and of Don Pelayo as initiator of the "Reconquest" of Spain from the "Moors. …

Del esfuerzo del traductor a la despreocupación del copista: la versión del Libro de Job de fray Luis de León

Abstract: En su Exposicion del Cantar de los Cantares , fray Luis de Leon se sirvio de una version judeorromance para componer su propia traduccion Aunque aquella le sirvio de guia, el agustino no se convirtio por entonces en un mero copista: su deseo de transformar y personalizar la antigua version judeoespanola aun estaba presente En su traduccion del Libro de Job , en cambio, copio sin reservas una de las versiones sefardies mas conocidas, la Biblia de Ferrara, hasta el punto de que es la mayor o menor fidelidad a ese texto lo que determina el famoso cambio de tono que algunos observaron en la version del agustino

Alexander and the Geographer's Eye: Allegories of Knowledge in Martín Fernández de Enciso's Suma de geographía (1519)

Abstract: Martin Fernandez de Enciso’s Suma de geographia (1519) is one of the cornerstones of Spanish cartographic and navigational literature in the first half of the sixteenth century Although the book is known today mainly for containing the first printed description of America in Spanish, the Suma was in fact a synthesis of the geographic knowledge of all the known world At the center of the book, Fernandez de Enciso records the medieval story of Alexander the Great’s journey to the Earthly Paradise This essay argues that Enciso’s reworking of this story within the context of the new cartographic developments of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries encapsulates the new observational and representational techniques derived from the early modern reading of Ptolomy, while at the same time situating the production of geographic knowledge at the center of the Spanish Imperial program

Barcelona come piedras: la impolítica mirada de Jacinto Esteva y Joaquim Jordá en Dante no es únicamente severo

Abstract: A contracorriente del juicio que ha considerado la produccion cinematografica experimental de la Escuela de Barcelona (EdB) como apolitica e incluso irresponsable en el contexto de la Espana franquista, este ensayo propone que la obra de vanguardia de la EdB, y particularmente su pelicula–manifiesto Dante no es unicamente severo (1967) de Jacinto Esteva y Joaquim Jorda, se emplazan en el registro de lo impolitico, en el sentido que le da a este concepto el filosofo Massimo Cacciari. El ensayo analiza el radical modo “impolitico” con que Dante , filmada en un momento algido de engarce de la izquierda antifranquista con el marxismo, especula sobre el salvaje desarrollo urbanistico de la Barcelona de los sesenta, sobre el fin del capitalismo industrial y sobre la propia clase social de sus realizadores. Con Dante , los cineastas de la EdB nos ofrecieron la posibilidad de una mirada nueva, radical e impolitica, que evoca en su tarea de deconstruccion la mirada de los ojos del anfibio del cuento de Julio Cortazar “Axolotl”.

Every Line a Verse, Every Art a Poem: Monsiváis, Minstrel of the Mexican Chronicle

Abstract: This study analyzes the myriad ways in which Carlos Monsivais incorporates poetry and song verse into his literary journalism. Whether this genre of the chronicle is a serious denunciation of criminal and inhumane acts in Mexico or a satiric jab at sociopolitical realities, its author does not refrain from inserting verses into his discourse, a custom which both entertains and challenges readers to actively construct the text's meaning. This essay includes a summary of the major Mexican movements and poets from which Monsivais takes most of his poetic subtitles and puns, and also a comment on the author's disheartened assessment of today's educational system and society's emphasis on the image. These dull the citizen's perception of the poetic or indeed of any appreciation of language. Still, ever the utopian, Monsivais keeps the torch for poetry's survival.

Translating Empire: José Martí, Migrant Latino Subjects, and American Modernities (review)

Abstract: Tomas, lau RA. Translating Empire: Jose Marti, Migrant Latino Subjects, and American Modernities. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2008. xviii + 379 pp.Translating Empire offers readers an indepth analysis of the world and writing of Jose Marti. In Lomas's hands we see Marti as neither predominantly a Cuban patriot nor a Latino migrant in New York, but rather as a complex, multifaceted figure whose origins, experiences, and life circumstances inform a series of literary translations that emerge synthetically out of his multiple subject positions. Lomas rereads Marti's journalism and related writings in relation to the cultural and political climate of the late-nineteenth-century US Translating Empire is less interested in illustrating Marti's uptake of major US literary figures like Walt Whitman or Ralph Waldo Emerson than in tracing the ways in which his various literary engagements with their writing and ideas stage strategic "translations" of burgeoning US imperialism for his readers. Translating Empire is carefully researched and contains astute readings of Marti's writing. Within its pages, a more complex Marti emerges than scholars have generally recognized.Lomas utilizes a concept developed by Silviano Santiago - the idea of the "space in between" - in order to explicate how Marti represented the disjunctive experiences of his life as deportee, political prisoner, and migrant in an emergent empire. Creating this space in between in his commentaries and in his translations of US literature and culture became, Lomas argues, the real work of translation for Marti. One of the most valuable aspects of this study is its keen attention to translation as a complex and nuanced process not only of converting words and ideas from one language into another, but of commenting and editorializing on those concepts for audiences who often see from the margins rather than from the center of the phenomena being described. Lomas refutes other scholars' too easy acceptance of Marti as an uncomplicated translator of Helen Hunt Jackson's popular novel Ramona, for example, or of Whitman's writing. Rather, she insists that Marti's critiques are embedded within his reproductions of these texts and that these critiques, collectively, refute the persistent exclusion of nineteenth- century Latino migrant writers from the history of modernism. Once we see Marti's translations as complex acts of literary and political creation - as "a fierce mixture of attraction, ambivalence, and critical distance" (37) - Lomas argues that "another American modernity" emerges, one that is characterized by subject matter made out of "openings, used and broken parts, and mixtures of elements" which must nonetheless perform "the work of an organized system" (47).The five chapters comprising Translating Empire begin with a substantial chapter on the notion of the space in between, which forms the method and scaffolding for subsequent chapters. The lengthy introduction, which touches on this idea, and the significant preface, particularly when combined with the first chapter, collectively generate the sense of somewhat too much throat clearing, but subsequent chapters are worth the wait. Chapter two analyzes Marti's contributions to the publication La America, showing how his articles express the anguish of democracy, progress, and modernization to readers who live, as Lomas eloquently writes, "between modernization's promises and its uneven or detrimental effects" (119). …

Portabella, Brossa, Santos: un triangle irregular

Abstract: Aquest assaig examina el rerefons cultural en que Pere Portabella va descobrir el seu cami com a cineasta. Despres dels inicis neorealistes a Madrid, el seu gir cap a un llenguatge avantguardista s’estudia en relacio amb els corrents avancats de Barcelona, tan poetics com artistics i musicals. Les figures del poeta Joan Brossa, el music Carles Santos i el moviment conceptual catala (sobretot el Grup de Treball), aixi com el context politic, s’analitzen en detall. L’obra de Portabella durant els 60 i els 70 nomes es pot entendre com la cruilla on conflueixen tots aquests elements.

A New "Cinema of Attractions"?: The Barcelona School's Exhibitionist Loops

Abstract: "This is an exhibitionist cinema." Tom Gunning defines "a cinema of attractions" as a predominant early cinematic form "that bases itself on . . . its ability to show something" (382; emphasis in original). The Barcelona School, an elusive group formed in contestation to the late-Francoist, Madrid-based Escuela Oficial de Cinematografia (EOC),1 avails itself of many of the techniques of "a cinema of attractions" to unveil fascist machinations. It does so by reproducing the "presentational style"2 of the documentary and popular cinema that the Franco dictatorship embraces. This demonstrative style has endured in narrative and nonnarrative cinema since the dawning of cinematic activity. In their mimicry3 of this style, the Barcelona School's avant-garde and underground films criticize it as a cover for fascism's exclusionary ethics. The School's body of work counters the ad nauseum displays of uniformity and inclusion representative of the nationalist cinema with its own reiterative expositions that convey an ethics of hybridity and emancipation. Indeed, Gunning even asserts that the exhibitionist quality of the early cinema would later attract and be exploited by avant-garde and underground cineastes because of its revolutionary possibilities (387). The participants in the Barcelona School typify this magnetism toward and harnessing of the energy of "a cinema of attractions" for dissidence.In this essay, I read Iacinto Esteva Grewe's Lejos de los arboles (1972) as the exemplar of the School's struggles under the late-Francoist film industry to develop its own brand of exhibitionism to expose and denounce the dictatorship's methods of producing and reproducing the nation through cinema. In the first part of my essay, I attend to the nationalist cinema. In the second, I turn back to the early cinematic activity of the nineteenth century. And in the third and final part, I demonstrate the Barcelona School's attempts to demythify Spanish nationalist cinema through the use of certain techniques such as repetition and interpellation that have been staples of the medium since its advent. Thus I filter the Barcelona School's mimicry of nationalist cinema through the lens of the early "cinema of attractions." I propose the disruptive exhibitionist cinematic loop as the aesthetic form the Barcelona School's political position takes. My reading of the way the loop functions in Esteva's film works toward an understanding of this configuration as constitutive of the School's entire body of work.I will begin with some detailed descriptions of the documentary and popular cinema supported by the Francoist state. NO-DO4 N° 968A: iBajo la paz de Franco!5 July 18, 1961 marks a quarter of a century of peace under General Francisco Franco, el Generalisimo. Throngs of people gather on the Paseo de la Castellana as the show, a commemorative military parade, begins. The repeated words - "la paz y el orden," "perfeccionamiento y modernizacion," "victoria," "veinticinco anos" - trickle off the tongue of the voiceover narrator, multiplying in cadence like so many uniformed bodies and machines entering and exiting the screen. Fifteen hundred vehicles, 500 combat cars, 200 pieces of artillery, 4,800 infantrymen, and 500,000 steadfast spectators of two and a half hours of parade, we are told, fill the frame. Even the Spanish skies swarm with aircraft, all flying in perfectly formed flocks as Franco salutes each and every automaton. Fifty thousand veterans from all regions and all classes file by chanting "Franco!" as they raise their right arms to mirror the Generalisimo' % obeisance. The veterans look up and stare us directly in the eyes. We are all part of the peaceful assembly. And for this brief moment, we are all Franco.NO-DO N° 974A: Bajo el sol del verano. It is still the summer of 1961, but now we see Franco, the national peacemaker, in quite a different role. Families flock to the glistening waters and soft sands of the Galician coast in the now popular custom of the veraneo, or summer vacation. …

Pere Portabella: hacia una política del relato cinematográfico (review)

Abstract: Hernandez, Ruben. Pere Portobeio: hacia una politica del relato cinematografico. Madrid: Errata Naturae, 2008. 313 pp.Ruben Hernandez makes it clear in the introduction to Pere Portabella: hada una politica del relato cinematografico that his book should not be read as a monograph of Portabella's filmic career but rather as an essay "sobre la relacion entre lo estetico y lo politico que tiene lugar en el ambito del relato" that posits "el cine de Portabella como vehiculo privilegiado de su reflexion" (15). While it would be difficult to fault the clarity with which Hernandez explains his methodology, the deliberate, if reductive, homage he pays to the essayistic works of Michel de Montaigne remains curiously underdeveloped throughout the remainder of the book. In moving beyond the introduction and its belabored transparency, Hernandez's emphasis on his essayistic engagement comes off as little more than carefully plotted authorial strategy, a preemptive attempt to exempt the collection from criticism that might take issue with his lack of interest in constructing a chronological or thematic framework for Portabella's cinematic oeuvre.Hernandez coyly underplays the text's objectives by claiming that he seeks to create nothing more than "una tentativa: una propuesta de lectura para el cine de Portabella dentro de un contexto filosofico, estetico y cinematografico" (17). The construction of these contexts, as one might expect, is immensely revealing. By defining the aesthetic and political dimensions of Portabella's cinematic project in relation to theoretical interventions by Aristotle, Theodor Adorno, Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin, Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, Jacques Derrida, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Guy Debord, Umberto Eco, Michel Foucault, Friedrich Nietzsche, Roland Barthes, Jacques Ranciere, and Paul Ricoeur, alongside the written works of filmmakers such as Jean-Luc Godard, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Luis Bunuel, Sergei Eisenstein, and Jean-Pierre Lajournade, Hernandez charts a laudable and intriguing course that clearly seeks to advance the scholarship on the Catalan filmmaker's works. The result of Hernandez's work, however, is rather mixed. The book's vast interpretive framework, while commendable for its ambition, ultimately devours the voice of its author, leaving the reader to make sense of a plethora of theoretical approaches that rarely coalesce to achieve a meaningful synthesis.The first half of Pere Portabella presents an introduction to the cinematic career of the Catalan auteur whose professional history is as defined by its political dissidence as it is by its immersion in avant-garde aesthetic practices. Hernandez breaks this section of the text into seven brief essays that address many of the highlights of the filmmaker's fifty-year career, such as the infamous 1972 exhibition of VampirCuadecuc (Spain 1970) at the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art, Portabella's work as producer of Bunuel's incendiary Viridiana (Spain 1961), his lack of engagement with the Barcelona School, and the similarity of directorial tactics employed by both Bunuel and Portabella. Hernandez's book forgoes analyses of El sopar (Spain 1974), Pont de Varsavia (Spain 1989), and Die Stille vor Bach (Spain 2007) in favor of No compteu amb els dits (Spain 1967), Nocturn 29 (Spain 1968), VampirCuadecuc (Spain 1970), Umbracle (Spain 1970), and Informe general (Spain 1976). It is rather unfortunate, though, that this section's overly reduced chapters, whose average length is just over twelve pages, lack the depth to properly scrutinize such compelling and intricately crafted texts. The scholarship presented in the book's first half left this reader desirous of further exploration on the collaborative nature of Portabella's works (particularly the influence of Joan Brossa and Carles Santos), Portabella's participation in the Grup de Treball, and the tenuously categorized Barcelona School. Regarding this last matter, I have serious reservations concerning not only Hernandez's appraisal of the Barcelona School's filmic output as nothing more than a "concepcion banalizada y descafeinada de l'art pour l'art" (65), but also with his wholesale acceptance of Portabella's characterization of the Barcelona School's works as devoid of "cualquier sentido critico" (62). …

Analogy, Exemplum, and the First Tale of Juan Manuel's El Conde Lucanor

Abstract: A Book ofExemplaIn his book on Boccaccio's Decameron, The Writer as Liar, Guido Almansi redirects Philippe Sollers's comment that Dante's Divine Comedy was "pense . . . comme livre" [conceived as a book] and remarks that this statement is perhaps more applicable to the Decameron than to the Divine Comedy.1 It probably matters little whether the assessment is more true of Dante's book than of Boccaccio's, or vice-versa, since to the degree that this is a statement about structure, much the same argument can also be made for a host of other works in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, especially those that are conceived as collections of fifty or a hundred tales or poems. Christine de Pizan's Cent ballades d'amant et de la dame and Marguerite de Navarre's Heptameron obviously follow Boccaccio in this vein. Nor would it be amiss to assert the same of Juan Manuel's Libro del conde Lucanor. Moreover, the "idea of the book," to take Jesse Gellrich's phrase, is an all-encompassing one in the Middle Ages, and one that associates the microcosmic and macrocosmic orders. The Conde Lucanor, interestingly enough, is conceived of as a single, overarching book which houses a succession of books (in the five-part version, at least), each supplemental "volume" being added to the previous ones. The work gradually "ascends" in terms of its hermeneutic challenges until it reaches its culmination in book 5, in which a return to stylistic simplicity accompanies the most complex question of all, namely, how to read the earthly world in terms of a semiotics of salvation. The relationship between social activity in this world and salvation in the next, which begins in book 1 as a series of challenges on the day-to-day level, is gradually reformed as a question of textual interpretation in books 2-4, only to emerge in book 5 as a matter of the world-as-text.2 The order that the Conde Lucanor seeks to understand at the macrocosmic level in book 5 grows out of the ordering at the microcosmic, textual level that the reader first confronts in book 1.Book 1 of the Conde Lucanor was clearly conceived, albeit two decades before Boccaccio's Decameron, as a framed collection of narratives, fifty in all, and both the comments internal to the text and the manuscript evidence point in this direction (after all, MSS H, M, and ? contain book 1 as a complete and independent work).3 Another commonplace about both the Decameron and the Divine Comedy, and which has also been uttered about the Conde Lucanor, is that the first tale serves as a kind of introduction to the entire work. Dante's predicament as he tries to ascend a hill in Canto 1 and Boccaccio's first story (the tale of Ciapelletto) present ideas that will arch over the whole work. Similarly, the first tale in the Conde Lucanor has been rightly seen as a kind of primus inter pares of the fifty tales and as more prominent for speaking to the concerns and content of the whole collection. In the case of the Conde Lucanor s first tale, "De lo que conteselo a un rey con un su privado," its introductory status is due in part, as critics have noted, to the fact that it thematizes the very relations between the counselor and the person counseled that will frame all the other tales of the collection.4The most important feature that is introduced in the first narrative, aside from the counselor-to-counseled (Patronio-to-Conde Lucanor) relationship, is undoubtedly the presentation of an intercalated narrative as an exemplum. To be sure, some critics have also seen Boccaccio's narratives in the Decameron as exempla, but their exemplary status remains debatable. In the case of the Conde Lucanor, by contrast, the narratives are overtly presented as exempla, which is also to say that they are specifically cast as didactic tales. While Patronio does not himself call his anecdotes "exempla," the manuscripts certainly do refer to them as such at the end of each tale as well as, in some instances, in the manuscript margins. …

The Wandering Signifier: Rhetoric of Jewishness in the Latin American Imaginary (review)

Abstract: GRAFF ZIVIN, ERIN. The Wandering Signifier: Rhetoric of Jewishness in the Latin American Imaginary. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2008. xi + 222 pp.Erin Graff Zivin's groundbreaking book The Wandering Signifier: Rhetoric of Jewishness in the Latin American Imaginary has arrived at a time when the field of Latin American Jewish studies is gaining visibility. Recent years have seen the publication of several compilations of essays on this topic.1 Graff Zivin's book stands out as the first comprehensive analysis of representations of "Jews" and "Jewishness" in nineteenth- and twentieth- century Latin American literature. The author uses scare quotes to indicate the constructedness of this category of identity. This is especially important in a book whose author traces the nuances and flexibility of the concepts of the "Jew" and "Jewishness" with the intention of examining the complexities and limits of their representations.The Wandering Signifier fills a void in the fields of Latin American and Jewish studies with an original, intelligent, and well- researched study of the problems of representing constructions of Jewish identity from a cultural, ideological, racial, and political perspective. Graff Zivin looks at the figure of the "Jew" in the literature of Latin American countries, where the majority of ethnic others are of indigenous and African descent. That is why her analysis of representations of "Jews" extends to other groups in Latin America that do not have agency. In her words, the " 'Jew' . . . functions as a powerful node onto which a fundamental anxiety toward difference can be projected and performed" (20).In the introduction, the author recreates the long and difficult history of representations of Jews from the Middle Ages in Europe to Latin America today. She also summarizes the critical literature on the subject and adds a brief history of the presence of Jews in Latin America. Then she begins the challenging task of comparing Jews and their cultural representation, which has so often resulted in antiSemitism. However, this book does not attempt to correct the category of "Jewishness," for the author does not believe in such essentialist identity categories.The title The Wandering Signifier refers to the rhetorical malleability and multiplicity of shape, significance, and meaning that "Jews" and "Jewish" identity take as they are transformed by authors within specific social and historical contexts. The wandering signifier is a particularly effective metaphor because not only does it imply the versatility of the "Jew" as a character in this body of literature - and previously in European literature - but it also points at the "symbolic life" of "Jews" and "Jewishness" in these writings.Graff Zivin questions the ethics of representation that stem from the examination of literary texts that appropriate the "Jewish" other to the realm of sameness. With this purpose in mind, she introduces Emmanuel Levinas 's groundbreaking philosophical concept of the ethical relationship between self and other. Levinas believes that written literature inevitably objectifies the other. While his philosophy inspired Graff Zivin's book, she questions his radical distinction between ethical and rhetorical language by highlighting the ways in which they overlap. The last chapter, "The Limits of Representation," delves into this issue.The Wandering Signifier discusses the presence of "Jews" and "Jewishness" in canonical as well as lesser-known works by Jewish and non-Jewish authors. It is divided into three parts, each centering on the themes and tropes of diagnosis, transactions, and conversions. The first chapter explores the importance of positivism in nineteenth- century Latin America and the central presence of Max Nordau among Latin American intellectuals of the time. She also looks at the interconnectedness of representations of Jews and the pathological discourse in European culture since the Middle Ages and in Latin American literature since the nineteenth century. …