Showing papers in "Hispanic Review in 2011"

Monstruos de ida y vuelta: gitanos y caníbales en la máquina antropológica barroca

Abstract: Este ensayo explora la interseccion de dos discursos de control y representacion de la Espana premoderna: el del gitano y el del canibal. Propone que la deshumanizacion y animalizacion de los gitanos durante el periodo de represion mas severo por parte de las autoridades espanolas se beneficio, moral y retoricamente, de la existencia de otros procesos similares que venian afectando a otros grupos marginales tanto dentro de la metropolis (caso de vagabundos) como en las colonias (caso de los canibales americanos). Las ideas de Giorgio Agamben en torno a la figura del homo sacer en el contexto de una biopolitica europea emergente sirven de marco critico para esta doble exploracion de las representaciones imperiales del canibal "domestico" y de la ansiedad canibal y asimiladora del propio imperio con respecto a ciertos grupos resistentes.

Género, imprenta y espacio social: una "poética de la pólvora" para la épica quinientista

Abstract: La poesia epica renacentista ha sido tradicionalmente considerada como un genero eminentemente culto y aristocratico. El presente ensayo, sin embargo, explora la relacion entre la emergencia y el exito de la epopeya hispanica durante la segunda mitad del siglo XVI y las practicas sociales y culturales de un grupo socio-profesional especifico: la soldadesca plebeya e hidalga de los ejercitos imperiales de Carlos V y Felipe II. Frente a la praxis literaria del romanzo italiano y los libros de caballeria espanoles, asociados a los espacios cortesanos de la alta aristocracia europea quinientista, la epica se constituira como el discurso de los "soldados platicos" de la corporacion guerrera Habsburgo, articulados como grupo en torno a los espacios sociales derivados de la revolucion militar renacentista. Asimismo, la nueva epopeya implicara un conjunto de practicas editoriales diferenciadas que tendran importantes consecuencias para la distribucion y el uso de los impresos epicos. Abstract: Renaissance epic poetry has traditionally been regarded as a highly learned and aristocratic genre. The present essay, however, explores the relation between the emergence and success of the Hispanic epic by the second half of the sixteenth century and the social and cultural practices of a very specific socioprofessional group: the plebeian and hidalgo soldiery of Charles V's and Philip II's imperial armies. In contrast with the Italian romance and Spanish chivalric literature, as literary practices associated with the nobility of European aristocratic courts, epic will be the discourse of the professional soldiers ( soldados platicos ) of the Habsburg military corporation, a social group articulated around the practices and spaces derived from the Renaissance's military revolution. Furthermore, the new epic will be shaped by a set of specific printing practices entailing important consequences for the distribution and reading of epic prints.

Imperial Celebrations, Local Triumphs: The Rhetoric of Festival Accounts in the Portuguese Empire

Abstract: This article analyzes festival accounts describing the ceremonial entries of Philip III into Lisbon in 1619 and of Bishop Manoel da Cruz into Mariana, Minas Gerais (Brazil), in 1749. The article compares the rhetorical strategies used to shift the object of celebration from the arriving dignitary to the city and its inhabitants. While the festive entries signal the power of a centralizing authority over local space, the festival accounts' authors seek to respond to the geographic, political, and cultural marginality with which their city has been ascribed. They do so by strategically deploying and redefining the very sign of their peripheral relationship to the geopolitical center: the use of the Spanish language in the case of the 1619 Lisbon entries, and the emphasis on distance and remoteness in the Brazilian festival account of 1749. The analysis reveals the role played by imperial locations in the articulation of local pride.

Luciana's Story: Text, Travel, and Interpretation in the Libro de Apolonio

Abstract: Much of the criticism on the Libro de Apolonio has focused on the identification of the mester de clerecia authors who produced this and other cuaderna via poems with the protagonist Apolonio, but a close analysis of the interaction between textuality and travel reveals a stronger connection between these authors and the little-studied character Luciana. Luciana's skills at reading, writing, and interpretation are unmatched among the characters of the poem, and her journey in the company of a text further strengthens her association with the written word. The narrative is permeated with pilgrimage imagery, and the fact that Luciana's traveling-companion text becomes both a pilgrim and a relic presents this kind of spiritual travel as a multivalent metaphor for textual interpretation. This examination of Luciana's involvement with the written word provides a more balanced view of writing, interpretation, and gender in the Libro de Apolonio .

Market, Audience, and the Fortunes and Adversities of Lazarillo de Tormes Castigado (1573)

Abstract: This article traces the publication history of Lazarillo de Tormes castigado (1573). The picaresque narrative suffered textual "reform" at the hands of the Inquisition in the 1570s, was later associated by Madrid book editors with the Guzman de Alfarache (1599), and was also appended to a popular conduct treatise, Galateo espanol (c. 1582), at the dawn of the seventeenth century. The analysis centers on the interconnected nature of market, audience, and literary production as it considers the various ways in which the Lazarillo was refashioned and recontextualized to fit its historical environments since its first appearance in 1554. A key aspect of the investigation seeks to understand the logic behind the repeated editorial pairing of the picaro's expurgated narrative of self-representation and a treatise on self-fashioning like the Galateo espanol.

Cuba and the New Origenismo (review)

Abstract: Buckwalter-ARias, james. Cuba and the New Origenismo. Woodbridge, Eng.: Tamesis, 2010. viii + 206 pp.James Buckwalter-Arias's Cuba and the New Origenismo is a lucid, finely argued book that brings new depth and perspective to scholarship on post-1989 Cuban literature. For a period whose cultural production, broadly defined, has been abundantly celebrated in popular and academic venues, this book invokes the distinction of the literary as a category and an aspiration. It reads the reemergence of "Origenes" - the literary movement that flourished in Cuba in the 1940s and 1950s - in post-1989 writing as a repudiation of the socialist imperatives that in the first decades of the Revolution, as the now standard history tells us, privileged politically committed works. But the "new origenismo" of narrative by Senel Paz, Jesus Diaz, Eliseo Alberto, Leonardo Padura, and Antonio Jose Ponte is rich with contradictions and unanswered questions, which Buckwalter-Arias elucidates with remarkable rhetorical eloquence and conceptual confidence. Indeed, like the article on "Reinscribing the Aesthetic: Cuban Narrative and Post-Soviet Cultural Politics" that the author published in PMLA in 2005, Cuba and the New Origenismo is notable for the unusual elegance of its writing.Buckwalter-Arias's critique of 1990s origenismo finds the prerevolutionary movement and its individual writers rehabilitated for what they represent politically - as emblems, that is, for a literature independent of the State - rather than as models of style or form. Novels of the 1990s have far less in common with Lezama's Paradiso, for example, than they do with the more prosaic and historically situated works of socialist realism ostensibly favored by the Revolution. At the same time, the Revolution as a negative force has an importance in 1990s writing that it lacked in the "Origenes" movement, which was neither clear nor organized in its relationship to Castro's regime and cultural policies, while the object of the origenistas' more cohesive and sustained derision, namely US neocolonialism and "the consumer-driven culture industry" (8), is conspicuously spared censure in their recent revival. This silence connects to a more general failure on the part of Cuban writers post-1989 to acknowledge the material conditions that govern the publication of their work: namely, those of the transatlantic publishing market in which, Buckwalter-Arias proposes with careful nuance, works read as dissident, while "not just commodities" (160), carry a historically determined and economically advantageous appeal. This final argument is both the crux of the book and the basis for its own vision of a "new origenista" literature that would transcend the simple aesthetics versus ideology - or Lezama versus Guevara - binary and enter "the realm of oppositional praxis" (195).In some ways the first and last chapters, on Paz's "El lobo, el bosque y el hombre uevo" and Ponte's El libro perdido de los origenistas, are the most interesting: the first because it demonstrates where the book's compelling narrative of rediscovery begins, and the last where the new origenismo may lead. In a skillful dialogue with some of the more strident criticisms of Paz's sexual politics, BuckwalterArias suggests that his story stands as a final but doomed attempt to reconcile Revolutionary teleology with the notion of transcendence that the origenistas had drawn from the modernists and, in its more redemptive strain, from Catholicism. Ponte's essay enters the narrative as an exception - inevitably, perhaps, Ponte being so deft a critic that he often seems to anticipate analyses of his work. Buckwalter-Arias, however, draws El libro perdido into a larger interrogation of the origenistas' legacy precisely through the loss that, for Ponte, is at the core of their project: finding in his work a "poetics of history, [a] means for mapping a historico-literary landscape" that "contributes at the very least to the task of conceptualizing the current impasse" (162). …

El niño de la calle y la ciudad fragmentada en la película Buenos Aires viceversa, de Alejandro Agresti

Abstract: La historia del huerfano de la calle Bocha, que integra la trama fragmentada de la pelicula argentina Buenos Aires viceversa (1996), de Alejandro Agresti, acentua y pone en abismo la vision que producen la ciudad mediatica, por una parte, y el cine moderno, por otra. Este articulo propone analizar el filme centrandose en la relacion entre las modalidades de esta vision y los efectos sociales y esteticos de la fragmentacion urbana. En esta perspectiva, examina en que medida la ciudad moderna aparece en la pelicula como un “no-lugar” cuya logica repercute en el relato, el montaje, la elaboracion plastica de los planos y el tratamiento del sonido. Subraya finalmente la tension estetica que revela la puesta en escena del nino y, en particular, la de su muerte: esta hace del filme un paradojico “melodrama fragmentado”.

Leisure and Agrarian Reform: Liberal Governance in the Traveling Museums of Spanish Misiones Pedagógicas (1931-1933)

Abstract: This article examines the program of bringing itinerant art museums to the rural areas implemented by the Misiones Pedagogicas of Spain's Second Republic. My analysis seeks to answer the following questions: a) Why did the government support these initiatives while peasants were using violence to contest its agrarian reform? b) How did museums fit into the Republic's program of public education? And 3) how did they treat the peasants' own culture? Tracing the philosophical foundations of the Museo del Pueblo in Manuel Bartolome de Cossio's (1857-1935) theory of leisure, I discuss Cossio's indebtedness to late-Victorian uses of art education for the poor and to krausista philosophy. I argue that the Museo del Pueblo's and the Misiones' emphasis on raising the spirit of citizenship by reorganizing peasants' free time constituted an experiment in liberal governance that responded to the urgent political need to implement a democratic policy for ruling the masses.

El amor platónico "en pelota": desenmascaramiento del sublimado apetito sexual en la Rima I de Bécquer

Abstract: Este estudio busca mostrar como el deseo sexual se esconde tras el discurso de "amor divino" que se parodia en la rima I de Gustavo Adolfo Becquer. Aunque no se analiza aqui Los Borbones en pelota, el titulo del articulo se inspira en el de esa coleccion de acuarelas porque en ella aparecen satiras de evidente contenido sexual contra figuras del poder politico y religioso del momento historico del autor. A fin de mostrar como Becquer insinua su empleo de la parodia y la ironia en tanto vehiculos para desenmascarar y subvertir las jerarquias sexuales y sociales y para simbolizar su vision alternativa del amor, en la primera parte de este trabajo se investigan algunos de sus textos metapoeticos, especialmente sus "Cartas literarias a una mujer". En la segunda parte, se ilustra la perspectiva etica del amor que Becquer privilegia a traves del analisis de la rima I como parodia del "amor platonico" que oprime a la mujer, cuya historia silenciada se oculta en el fondo del poema.

Adolfo Suárez y Felipe y Letizia: ficción televisiva y memorias inmediatas sobre la monarquía española

Abstract: Este trabajo analiza dos ficciones televisivas centradas en la representacion de la historia reciente espanola: las miniseries Adolfo Suarez, el Presidente y Felipe y Letizia, deber y querer , que fueron emitidas en 2010. En el estudio se destacan sus principales claves de contenido y se relacionan con otros productos dedicados a la informacion y la evocacion historica. La interpretacion propuesta resalta las distintas estrategias de memoria asumidas en cada una de estas realizaciones, que se apoyaron en el empleo de una seleccion diferenciada de tiempos historicos y de patrones dramaticos. Mientras que Adolfo Suarez destaca el sentido providencialista de la transicion democratica y de sus liderazgos historicos, Felipe y Letizia evoca aspectos mucho mas triviales o parodicos. El contraste entre ambas permite resaltar el uso de distintas significaciones sobre la monarquia por parte de la ficcion espanola actual. Abstract: This paper analyzes two television miniseries centered on the representation of recent Spanish history: Adolfo Suarez , el presidente and Felipe y Letizia , deber y querer . Both were aired in 2010. The study outlines their general content, and interrogates other products dedicated to information and historical evocation. My analysis highlights various strategies of memory undertaken in both productions. These strategies were based on the use of a differential selection of historical periods and dramatic patterns. While Adolfo Suarez emphasized the providential meaning of democratic transition and its historic leadership, Felipe y Letizia evoked much more mundane or even parodic aspects. This contrast permits the examination of the uses to which contemporary Spanish fiction puts different significations regarding the monarchy.

La inspirada poética del soneto "Al rey, nuestro señor", de Hernando de Acuña

Abstract: “Al rey, nuestro senor”, considerado hoy el mas importante soneto de Hernando de Acuna, no ha sido siempre igual de apreciado. En el analisis de este soneto, lo decisivo no es determinar el destinatario, pues el poeta lo desdibuja muy conscientemente. Esta ambiguedad es el rasgo mas sobresaliente del poema: formula con un lenguaje contundente una profecia muy imprecisa. Se trata de un buen ejemplo de la virtuosa poetica de la ambiguedad.

Unamuno, Schleiermacher, Humboldt: A Question of Language

Abstract: In Unamuno criticism there has been an irresistible temptation to see him as a precursor of some of the later twentieth-century developments in linguistics and literary theory. But a comparison of his ideas on language with those of certain nineteenth-century linguistic philosophers, with whom he was acquainted through his early philological training, shows that his ideas are reworkings of early-nineteenth-century thinkers. Two in particular, Friedrich Schleiermacher and Wilhelm von Humboldt, appear to have exercised a shaping and lasting influence on Unamuno’s ideas on language, which he formulated throughout his life. This article considers how Unamuno came across these two thinkers, and compares his and their ideas on language and thought, language and person, language and nation, and language and creativity.

Encrucijadas de la economía simbólica en la obra de Julián del Casal

Abstract: espanolEste articulo postula que uno de los componentes esenciales de la poetica del modernismo hispanoamericano fue la toma de conciencia de que el campo de produccion cultural constituye un mundo economico al reves, tal como lo plantea Pierre Bourdieu. Dicha conciencia permitio establecer leyes de distribucion y acumulacion de capital simbolico. El analisis se concentra en "Neurosis" de Julian del Casal, pero se extiende a las afinidades entre este poema y ensayos, cronicas y cuentos del mismo autor, asi como de otros escritores influyentes. Se incluye tambien una discusion de los numerosos vinculos entre el poema y obras cientificas del siglo XIX acerca de la neurosis y la histeria. EnglishThis article argues that an essential component of the poetics of Spanish-American Modernismo was its awareness of the fact that the field of cultural production is an economic world upside down, as Pierre Bourdieu would put it. Such awareness was fundamental to organizing laws of distribution and accumulation of symbolic capital and power. The analysis focuses primarily on Julian del Casal's "Neurosis," but it pays close attention to the affinities between this poem and essays, chronicles, and short stories penned by Casal as well as several other influential authors. Additionally, this study discusses the numerous links between Casal's poem and nineteenth-century scientific works on neurosis and hysteria.

Vicente Huidobro y el cine: La escritura frente a las luces y sombras de la modernidad

Abstract: espanolEste articulo aborda la relacion de Huidobro con el cine a partir de sus poco conocidas cronicas cinematograficas. En ellas el autor demuestra su fascinacion y conocimiento sobre el nuevo medio, que revela un interes vanguardista por lo nuevo, y al mismo tiempo hace patente cierta "ansiedad de contaminacion" que se expresa en su preferencia por el cine mudo y en la defensa de un cine puro. Estas preferencias de intelectual letrado contrastan con el extenso uso que Huidobro hace de tecnicas cinematograficas en la escritura, principalmente en Cagliostro. Para Huidobro el cine es una tecnica y una experiencia nueva, que se vincula con la modernidad a traves de la guerra, la magia y el mercado. EnglishThis article deals with the relationship between Huidobro and the cinema, using his little-known chronicles as a starting point. In these chronicles the author demonstrates his fascination and knowledge about the new medium, revealing an avant-garde interest for the new. At the same time, these texts bring to view a sort of "contamination anxiety," which is disclosed through Huidobro's preference for silent movies and through his defense of pure cinema. These choices of a letrado intellectual enter in conflict with his extensive use of cinematic techniques, especially in Cagliostro. For Huidobro, cinema is a technique and a new kind of experience, linked to modernity through war, magic and the marketplace.

Hispanic Casuistry Studies: Room to Grow

Abstract: KALLEN do R F, ? ? lai R e. Conscience on Stage: The Comedia as Casuistry in Early Modern Spain. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2007. 299 pp.del rio parra, elena. Cartografias de la conciencia espanola en la Edad de Oro. Mexico, DF: Fondo de Cultura Economica, 2008. 310 pp.The term "casuistry" (The ascendency of casuistry began in earnest with Martin de Azpilcueta Navarro's influential Manual para confesores y penitentes (Salamanca, 1556), and lasted one hundred years, until Blaise Pascal ridiculed casuists' excesses in his initially anonymous Lettres provinciales (1656). Largely as a result of this brilliant satire, the term retains to this day a connotation of moral chicanery and laxity. But Pascal's mockery failed to acknowledge casuistry's function as an instrument for extending the Church's active guidance of individual consciences. Early modern Catholicism urgently needed to adjust medieval morality for a broader set of situations arising in a changing world. Greater flexibility was introduced through the doctrine of Probabilism, according to which, given doubts about the best among a range of moral choices, it was permitted to adopt a "less probable" course of action, provided there was at least some basis for thinking it justified. Not all casuists were probabilists, a point to which I will return below; but a probabilistic casuistry was the most adaptable to different professions, social classes, and political circumstances.Spanish Neo-Scholasticism played a dominant role in the development of casuistry in general and Probabilism in particular. Among the leading casuists after Trent were Dominicans who taught at Salamanca, like Azpilcueta, Domingo Soto, and Bartolome Medina, who was the first to openly espouse Probabilism. But crucial justifications ofthat doctrine came from the pens of two Jesuit theologians, Gabriel Vasquez and the great jurist Francisco Suarez. Suarez argued for Probabilism on the grounds that in doubtful cases a confessor must respect penitents' unalienable possession of free will liberum arbitrium). In this regard, he clearly drew on Molinism, the defense of free will developed by another Neo-Scholastic Jesuit theologian, Luis de Molina.Indeed, casuistry was a Jesuit specialty. From its inception, this order sought to extend the influence of the Church in worldly affairs, including matters of state. Of particular importance for that mission was the Papal license to hear confession anywhere and to absolve sins normally reserved to bishops. Expertise in hearing confession thus became a fundamental part of the Jesuit curriculum, and several leading casuistical treatises of the Baroque period are essentially Jesuit textbooks. …

"Of the Smog": José Emilio Pacheco's Concussive Poetics of Mexico City

Abstract: This article examines Jose Emilio Pacheco's poetic representations of Mexico City by advancing a theoretical framework derived from the discourses of ecocriticism and uneven geographical development. In combining the referential, material bases for Pacheco's poems about Mexico City, such as geological, ecological, and economic processes with his intertextual poetics, the study supplements scholarly attention to temporality and textuality in Pacheco's work by emphasizing its spatial and environmental dimensions. The article argues that Pacheco's short poems conceptualize Mexico City's development as an ongoing material and symbolic conquest of space in which natural, economic, and literary processes collide. These poems model an ecologically rooted geographical imaginary that uses literary language to measure empirical realities, including the smog that literally obscures mountains while figuratively constituting the linguistic and literary processes charged with representing them. Pacheco's ecopoetics meld self-reflexive intertextuality with an exploration of how language represents and often obscures these natural and economic processes.

Espacio de Juan Ramón Jiménez: extremos del poema en prosa, impura inclusividad, hundimiento del yo y resistencia a la fusión total

Abstract: El presente articulo toma Espacio como lugar para la reevaluacion definitiva de la obra ultima de Juan Ramon Jimenez. Tras un analisis del conflicto entre prosa y verso que inquieto a Juan Ramon desde su exilio, se estudia una prolongacion poco conocida del debate en torno a la poesia pura que lo enfrento a Pablo Neruda en los anos treinta. En esta indagacion se revela una cercania entre ambos poetas que es concluyente en el caso de Espacio. Tambien con la intencion de renovar la lectura de Juan Ramon, se abandona el paradigma del yo, para centrarse en el poema como trabajo de amplia inclusividad y localizar algunas de las coordenadas desde las que esta se realiza. Por ultimo, se postula Espacio como poema excesivo que muestra, no obstante, una clara resistencia a la fusion en el todo y una opcion alternativa a la nocion de obra de arte total.

Caracas en nuestra (tele)novela de todas las noches: Mujeres de un solo zarcillo y la novela telenovelizada

Abstract: Este articulo propone que la "novela telenovelizada" es la union experimental y radical de la novela literaria y la telenovela latinoamericana. Este genero hibrido recupera al lector de novelas del siglo XIX al atraer al publico contemporaneo acostumbrado a ver telenovelas a un nuevo texto literario que mezcla elementos familiares de la television y la literatura. Si la novela del siglo XIX sirvio en America Latina como vehiculo para imaginar y construir la nacion, la "novela telenovelizada" abre un espacio para que un nuevo lector altamente visual vuelva a imaginar y a reconstruir sus propios paseos geograficos mediante un retorno al texto literario. El analisis se enfoca en Mujeres de un solo zarcillo , una obra urbana y transnacional escrita por Cristina Policastro que emblematiza el caos y el lado ludico de la Venezuela de los anos noventa. Abstract: This article posits that the novela telenovelizada is the experimental and radical union of the literary novel and the Latin American telenovela . This hybrid genre recoups the nineteenth-century reader of novels by attracting the contemporary public accustomed to viewing telenovelas to a new literary text that blends familiar elements from television and literature. If the novel in nineteenth-century Latin America served as a vehicle to imagine and build the nation, the novela telenovelizada opens the forum for a new highly visual reader to reimagine and to reconstruct her own geographical wanderings through a return to the literary text. The analysis focuses on Mujeres de un solo zarcillo , an urban and transnational work by Cristina Policastro that emblematizes the chaos and lightheartedness of Venezuela in the 1990s.

Crossing Over: Gender and Empire in Fanny Calderón de la Barca's The Attaché in Madrid

Abstract: Unlike her successful Life in Mexico (1843), which enjoyed the patronage of the American historian William Hickling Prescott, Frances Calderon de la Barca's The Attache in Madrid (1856) has received little critical attention. Published anonymously in New York as the work of a young German diplomat, Calderon's travel book on Spain sheds new light on her transatlantic writing career. This study examines the dynamics of self-revelation and containment in The Attache , foregrounding Calderon's imbrication in the politics of empire and her experimentation with literary gender crossing. In The Attache , Calderon deploys maleness not only as a cover, but also to contest nineteenth-century US discourse on Spanish decadence and to counter rhetorical strategies of domination common to male-authored accounts of Spain.

Este . . . Cíclope: Góngora's Polifemo and the Poetics of Disfiguration

Abstract: This essay argues that Gongora’s Fabula de Polifemo y Galatea operates in a skeptical mode, responding to an epistemological crisis that dominated seventeenth-century Spanish intellectual and artistic production. In dialogue with skeptical intellectual trends, particularly Montaigne’s brand of Pyrrhonism, Gongora’s elliptical, anamorphic poetics renders language nearly indecipherable. Underlying its monstrous appearance, however, is an elegant symmetry and intelligibility, a circumstance analogous to the cosmic incoherency of the Ptolemaic and Copernican systems resolved by Kepler’s elliptical planetary orbits. Similarly, Polyphemus’s monocular view distorts his picture of the world, a narcissistic condition exposed by the anamorphic pictorial practice Gongora translates into verse. [End Page 547] Gongora’s poem enacts, both in plot and method, a process of desengano in which a literary figuration becomes disfigured, creating a new figural expression of the world and exposing the contingent nature of perception and interpretation.

Indigenous and Popular Thinking in América (review)

Abstract: kusch, Rodolfo. Indigenous and Popular Thinking in America. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2010. Ixxvii + 209 pp.This book, first published in 1970 in Spanish, is one of the most important works by Argentinean philosopher and anthropologist Rodolfo Kusch, and constitutes a milestone in the conception of Latin American thinking and identity "from within." It is also the first of Kusch's works to be translated into English. In Indigenous and Popular Thinking in America (IPTA), the philosopher elaborates the anthropological and philosophical category of estar as one of the characterizing features of indigenous thinking. As he explains, the (Latin) American self is culturally split by ser and estar, and needs to overcome this divide by reconciling both conditions. In this way, Kusch proposes, the (Latin) American self will be able to focus on his own cultural human determination. This reconciliation could be possible by means of what he calls fagocitacion, understood in this context as absorption or consumption of the self.At this point, it is important to note the author's discursive and linguistic choices, especially in his use of Aymara, Quechua, Spanish, and Latin terms for key concepts that are difficult to translate to another language without losing its intended meaning. As Maria Lugones and Joshua Price, translators of this edition in English, observe, there is an important cluster of key concepts that are examined in their indigenous linguistic context, such as utcatha, pacha, amauta, and kuty, among others. They add to the Spanish and Latin terms that form part of the author's central reflection on the definition of (Latin) American self: ser, estar, asi, ahi, habitat. In their introduction, the translators recognize Kusch's intentional choice of these terms. Faced, then, with the task of translating into another language and the subsequent distortion of meaning as well as the reduction that a glossary would imply in this case, Lugones and Price opt for intruding the least into the thinker's mission. They keep these key terms in their original language, provide translation to English - when available and in parenthesis - and try to keep them embedded in Kusch's reflection. Likewise, the translators are also aware of the author's choice of America when naming Latin America while North America is considered and referred to as part of the West and Modernity. Thus Lugones and Price leave America with an e in the English version since this name reflects Kusch's depiction of the repressed Latin American reality. Finally, we need to be aware of Kusch's choice to refer to notions such as "American," "European," "Indigenous," and "Western" in an abstract universal sense, as well as his particular way of referring to Modernity as "the West" or "the Science."In order to understand the breadth of Kusch's ideas in this book, it is helpful to look at his works before and after the production and publication of this text. In 1953, the author explored the dual character of America and the mestizo consciousness in a series of essays that were published under the title La seduccion de la barbarie: analisis heretico de un continente mestizo. Almost ten years later, his America profunda (1962) examined the Andean world vision and proposed the necessity of looking carefully at the presence of the "American soul" (alma americana). In this work, Kusch also set the ground for his reflection between "being" (ser) or "being someone" (ser alguien) in the West, which should be understood differently from the indigenous "being standing" (estar). The latter constitutes the basic element of his reflection on the mestizo consciousness that he started to propose in his 1953 book. In 1996, Kusch published two new books whose ideas will surface in IPTA. A concept similar to what Mary Louise Pratt proposed in 1991 as the "contact zone" can be found in his Indios, portenos y dioses. This book showcased his reflection on his travels in Latin America and his explanation about areas or zones of contact between Westerners and Indians. …

Alegorías del poder: crisis imperial y comedia nueva (1598-1659) (review)

Abstract: Puede ser que muchos crı́ticos ya hayan enterrado las teorı́as literarias que predominaron en el estudio de los textos áureos en el último cuarto del siglo XX, cuando el psicoanálisis, los estudios culturales, el nuevo historicismo y el posestructuralismo (entre otros) penetraron el campo de investigación. Lo cierto es que se han cuestionado sus aproximaciones posmodernas a la hora de aplicarse al análisis de obras sacadas de un contexto histórico cuya distancia temporal puede llevar a conclusiones anacrónicas, narcisistas o estériles. Incluso Terry Eagleton, quien alabó y enseñó en sus principios la teorı́a literaria, declaró en una obra de 2003 el ‘‘fin de la teorı́a’’ tal y como la hemos conocido. En After Theory (2003) Eagleton subraya que tales acercamientos al texto literario se han convertido en una actividad improductiva y egocéntrica, que compara en varias ocasiones con el onanismo. Para invertir esta tendencia, invita a los crı́ticos a volver a una causa más militante y universal en sus afanes de presentar la complejidad del texto a los estudiantes de hoy en dı́a, mientras los enfrentamos a la complejidad de un mundo en proceso de globalización. Esta problemática está en el centro de los debates que surgen entre la filologı́a practicada en España y los estudios culturales desarrollados en los Estados Unidos. El libro de Antonio Carreño-Rodrı́guez, Alegorı́as del poder, se inscribe dentro de esta nueva coyuntura. El tema de la alegorı́a en relación con la monarquı́a, y en

"Personas fidedignas y palabras formales": estrategias de legitimación del narrador historiográfico en la cuarta parte de la Crónica del Perú de Pedro Cieza de León

Abstract: El presente ensayo discute algunas estrategias de legitimacion empleadas por el historiador espanol Pedro Cieza de Leon en la cuarta parte de su Cronica del Peru con la intencion de cimentar su autoridad para narrar el pasado colonial peruano. En especial, se concentra en la forma en que Cieza redefine el concepto de testimonio de vista —o autoridad autoptica, en terminos de Anthony Pagden—, considerado fundamental para la adquisicion del conocimiento por parte de los cronistas de Indias. Cieza no fue humanista y vivio en los Andes varios anos, durante los cuales participo en las guerras civiles libradas entre los conquistadores que mas tarde narraria en su Cronica . Fue soldado, pero tambien fue un lector voraz y logro desarrollar una vision sofisticada sobre la interaccion entre la experiencia textual y la experiencia vivida. Este ensayo tambien proporciona una lectura de Cieza en el contexto mas amplio de la historiografia renacentista.

"Higiene en la casa del habla": Eugenio Montejo's El cuaderno de Blas Coll

Abstract: El cuaderno de Blas Coll (1981) by Venezuelan poet Eugenio Montejo consists of a collection of notes written by Blas Coll, an apocryphal linguist who devises a project of transforming the Spanish language by reducing all words to bisyllabic and monosyllabic expressions. The character of Blas Coll is composed of allusions to certain philosophers, writers, and doctrines. This paper identifies and analyzes some of the main cultural and theoretical components of this character's ideas: Plato's Cratylus, the figure of the nineteenth century Spanish American letrado, the linguistic doctrines of Wilhelm von Humboldt, and Stephane Mallarme's theories about linguistics and poetry. This analysis demonstrates how Coll's project is a device by which Eugenio Montejo elaborates a meditation on the origin and limits of language, and on how this reflection can be materialized in the poetic craft.

Emerging from Darkness: National and Theatrical Revision in Jesús Campos García's Auto Sacramental

Abstract: This article demonstrates how Jesus Campos Garcia's 1995 play A ciegas: auto sacro de realismo inverosimil o de la irrealidad verosimil (Aproximadamente) uses the auto sacramental as a vehicle to express content that undermines the genre's original objectives. The play dramatizes the sense of disappointment and dissatisfaction associated with the transition to democracy both in contemporary Spanish history and in the Spanish theater industry. Campos empties the auto of its authoritative ideologies, deregulating outdated doctrines while perpetuating Spain's deeply rooted theatrical traditions.

Killing Carmens: Women's Crime Fiction from Spain (review)

Abstract: GODSLAND, Shelley. Killing Carmens: Women's Crime Fiction from Spain. Cardiff, UK: U of Wales P, 2007. 230 pp.Why must Carmen be killed? Readers of Shelley Godsland's new book must inevitably reflect on the question.In Merimee and then Bizet, the sensuous protagonist dazzles and deceives men, living outside Spanish law and 19th century mores. She is sexuality and revolution; give her liberty, or give her death!That fearless woman who revels in sensuousness and disregards convention is a hero to some. They usually focus on Bizet, ignoring that in Merimee, Carmen is bound by Gypsy law, which may by turns be extremely lax or absolutely brutal, but is always fatalistic. However, as musicologist Susan McClary points out, Carmen has most often been perceived as a threat. "She stands for everything that can potentially go wrong with women," says McClary ironically. "Just as we expect to see Dracula killed off at the end of a vampire movie, we expect to see this monstrous woman killed off" (206).1In a sparkling new study of women in Iberian crime fiction, Killing Carmens, Shelley Godsland alludes to the slippery correlation between female liberty embodied by nineteenth- century Carmen, and the myth of Andalusian female "Spanishness" as it was hyper-performed during and after the Francoist dictatorship. Within this clash of cliches, Godsland stakes out the first study of the Iberian roman noir written by and about women.The book grows logically out of Godsland's work specializing in Iberian crime fiction, together with her significant body of research on gender issues in the Hispanic and Lusophone world. Formerly Director of the Crime Fictions Research Centre at Manchester Metropolitan University, Godsland has refined a method of examining female-authored crime fiction through several different ideological feminist lenses. She demonstrates familiarity with the general work done by and about male-authored novela negra over the past 25 years. What Jose Colmeiro's 1994 landmark book La novela policiaca espanola was to the study of Spanish crime fiction in general, Godsland's book is to the study of crime fiction by and about women.Godsland begins by demonstrating that although much critical attention has focused on the way that the post-dictatorship crime novel has been utilized in order to articulate Spanish political and social issues, almost no studies have centered on the feminocentric novela negra. In Chapter 1, "From Feminism to PostFeminism," she lays out how she will navigate the primary conceptual differences between "equality feminists," who basically fight for women's equality, with "difference 'feminists'" (and the quotes around 'feminist' are Godsland's), who promote "an exclusively female genealogy, that focuses on the primacy of the female body, that exhorts women to refuse to participate in the wide political apparatus, and that promulgates such notions as the female return to the domestic space" (76). Maria Antonia Oliver's Lonia Guiu, for example, fits neatly within the first category, as she "investigates crimes that highlight the relentless multiplicity of aggressions to which women are subjected by men, and function as a sounding board for the author's commitment to second wave or equality feminism" (20). By contrast, Alicia Gimenez-Bartlett's Inspector Petra Delicado is, in part, studied in conjunction with Spanish and international theories of difference "feminism." Godsland examines Delicado's ambiguity as "a woman who appears to enjoy social, sexual, financial, and some professional autonomy, but whose positioning within the police force and whose own perspective on many gender issues appear to render many of those autonomies of questionable authenticity" (40). Despite this, Godsland concludes that Petra's shifting stances are used by Gimenez-Bartlett to work through "the prevailing and often contradictory gendered ideologies which her character must negotiate" (50). In some ways, Petra (like Lourdes Ortiz's Barbara Arenas before her), is simply a "masculinized" female detective. …

"La enfermedad extraña": Inapetencia, Class and Eating Disorders in La esfinge maragata

Abstract: Sickly women populate the pages of Concha Espina's 1914 novel La esfinge maragata. While on the one hand the inhabitants seem to be strong and enduring, on the other hand, their bodies are represented as broken down, aged, and wasted. What I propose to add to the scholarship on Espina, and specifically to the study of La esfinge, is to align her with other women writers in her exploration of the metaphor of illness. This article explores how contemporary feminist theories on eating disorders can help us understand the dynamics of illness in this novel, in particular how these theories apply to the two main characters Mariflor and Marinela. A study of the body and what the women consume or refuse to consume along with their struggles with gender conformity will lead me to explore the ways Espina's novel illuminates the relationship between social class and women's illness.

Reescribir el canon: vanguardia histórica, cultura popular y política cultural en el Museo Reina Sofía ("los ismos de Ramón Gómez de la Serna")

Abstract: Este ensayo se propone examinar las relaciones entre museo, historiografia del arte y politica. En concreto, se explora el papel que juegan el museo publico de arte moderno espanol y las exposiciones temporales en la reescritura del canon y en la legitimacion de la nueva derecha. Con la exposicion “Los ismos de Ramon Gomez de la Serna y un apendice circense”, organizada en el Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia de Madrid en 2002, Juan Manuel Bonet, director de esa institucion, reta la narrativa de la historia del arte occidental desde una perspectiva periferica. Su lectura subraya la fuerte presencia de la tradicion artistica y de la cultura popular en el nacimiento de la vanguardia europea y construye, asimismo, una tradicion cultural con la que pueda conectar la nueva derecha centrista espanola. Abstract: This essay explores the relationship between museum, art historiography, and local politics. Specifically, it examines the role of the public museum of modern art and its temporary exhibitions in the rewriting of the artistic canon, as well as in the legitimation of the new political right. With the exhibition, Los ismos de Ramon Gomez de la Serna , in the Museo Nacional de Arte Reina Sofia de Madrid (2002), the director of the MNCARS during that period, Juan Manuel Bonet, challenges the established narrative on Western avant-garde from a peripheral point of view. His reading emphasizes the strong presence of the Spanish artistic tradition and popular culture in the origins of the European avant-garde. It also helps to build a cultural tradition to which the liberal and democratic Spanish right can attach itself.

Escribiendo desde los márgenes: colonialismo y jesuitas en el siglo XVIII (review)

Abstract: DEL VALLE, IVONNE. Escribiendo desde los margenes: colonialismo y jesuitos en el siglo XVIII. Mexico, DF: Siglo Veintiuno, 2009. 301 pp.Escribiendo desde los margenes: colonialismo y jesuitas en el siglo XVIII confirms Ivonne Del Valle's place as one of the clearest recent critical voices to apply postcolonial theory to Spain and Latin America. Del Valle employs a "postcolonial perspective" on Amerindian epistemology that evolves the ideas of Foucault and Taussig and adapts the theoretical constructs of Bhabha and the Jesuit de Certeau to the particularities of eighteenth- century transatlantic Spain. This theoretical context, as well as a broad sampling of scholarship on colonial Spanish America ranging from Angel Rama and Walter Mignolo to Maureen Ahern, Antony Higgins, Jose Rabasa, Gustavo Verdesio, and David J. Weber provide the foundation for her study of Jesuit texts about colonial New Spain that reveal indigenous acts of self-preservation and resistance to colonialism. Escribiendo desde los margenes entails a particularly productive manipulation of the theoretical dyad of center/ metropolis and peripheries/borderlands. Del Valle's book makes a substantial contribution to the study of Jesuits and colonialism and is especially welcome to transatlantic Hispanic eighteenth- century studies.1Within the history of science, scholars struggle against a traditionally unilateral vision in which agents of Western epistemology go forth from European "centers" and, in the process of colonizing peripheral sites, appropriate and erase local knowledge. However, the task of recuperating Amerindian, African, or Asian practices and knowledge and altering traditional conceptualizations of the evolution of global scientific modernity presents distinct challenges. As Del Valle points out when glossing Edward Gibbon, it is easy to demonstrate ways that agents of empires (first Roman, then Spanish) expanded European technologies and epistemologies (hacer and saber) into imperial "margins." The more difficult task for scholars of the eighteenth century is to question the totality of European "universalizing pretensions" and reveal instead "the effect of other universes on enlightened colonial discourse" (book jacket).2 Few scholars are linguistically equipped to hear other universes' voices directly, although in the case of New Spain, some recuperate Nahuatl source texts not yet translated into Spanish. Most look to the scientific writings of Spanish, Spanish American (criollo), and/or Jesuit authors to suggest how understanding European adaptations of alternative ways of knowing might be central to re-evaluating the history of science. In the Introduction to Escribiendo desde los margenes, Del Valle acknowledges the complexities of unearthing from European "scriptural tombs" silenced voices that "evoke the fragments of other cultures and peoples" (35). She hopes that perhaps, "by trying to recuperate their voices," we might disturb rigid notions of the past (3o).3 Del Valle explores the "scriptural tombs" of Jesuit historiography on the Nayar, Sonora, and Baja California regions first written in Spanish, Latin, and German. Reading eighteenthcentury Jesuit narratives against their grain, Del Valle looks for textual gaps in their official burial of local sources when appropriating peripheral knowledge into a global, universalizing scientific discourse. She concludes that in the process of mining natural historical and ethnographic data from these three peripheral regions to enrich European "centers" of knowledge (Mexico City, Madrid, and Rome), these Jesuit texts simultaneously elide and reveal alternative ways of knowing and doing. In New Spain's contact zones, tensions between European and borderland epistemologica! universes cause the "complex processes of redefinition of Jesuit subjectivity [that are] legible in Jesuit texts" (39). Before presenting individual case studies from these three regions that detail "pressures that borderlands exercised on their new inhabitants" (39) and the Jesuits' frustrated quests to impose Catholicism and their "universal epistemology for global colonialism" (40), Del Valle describes the mid- eighteenth- century context within which she reads Jesuit historiography as "textual peripheries" that unveil the "eccentric" (37). …