Showing papers in "Hispanic Review in 2014"

"Taking the Gold Out of Egypt": Prostitution and the Economy of Salvation in the Vida de María Egipciaca

Abstract: This article explores how the thirteenth-century verse Vida de Marý´a Egipciaca portrays the sins, conversion, and spectacular penance of Mary of Egypt in terms of her rejection of and eventual entrance into orthodox economies. As I argue, hagiographic legends about prostitutes have economic subtexts and the Vida offers paradoxical visions of prostitution both as a foil and as an analogue for the financial metaphors that undergird the very economy of salvation. In the Vida, prostitution, as practiced by the repentant Marý´a, not only represents sexual depravity, but also a move from economic indifference and the unregulated distribution of sexual activities to a consciousness of just prices and exchange values. The poem thus offers a striking medieval articulation of Christian salvation economy, relating the salvation economy to notions of women�s value as objects of exchange. In so doing, the Vida also interlaces the context of thirteenth-century Mediterranean economic culture with its poetics.

Beyond the Visual City: The Sound of Space in Fernando Pérez's Suite Habana

Abstract: This article considers the role of sound in the production of space and subjectivity, as seen in Cuban director Fernando Perez's 2003 film, Suite Habana. It argues that sound modifies the film�s ideological and visual representations of the city by creating an aural imaginary that represents an affective and corporeally felt notion of community. In this way, sound not only links unrelated characters to one another on the screen, it also expands the enclosed, visual experience of the city into a soundscape that connects the space on the screen to the space of the theater or the home of the audio-viewer. Sound thus unites otherwise disparate subjects into a sonic community that crosses spatial boundaries. The article grounds its arguments in analyses of voice, music, and the construction of both acousmatic and hyperreal sound in the film.

El caso de las "mujeres sueltas": Isabella de Luna, prostituta en el ejército imperial y cortesana española en Roma, y la Monja Alférez, Catalina de Erauso

Abstract: Este articulo explora el discurso que se crea en torno a la mujer "suelta", la viajera y la trotamundos en el mundo hispanico de la temprana modernidad, a traves de los ejemplos de Catalina de Erauso, mas conocida como la Monja Alferez, y de la cortesana granadina afincada en Roma Isabella de Luna. Si segun el mensaje que se desprende de la literatura de conducta, el viaje, como describe Fray Luis de Leon, "pervierte su propia naturaleza", ?queejemplo ofrecen las mujeres que, a pesar de todo, viajan y se mueven incluso hacia otro continente? Los casos analizados permiten indagar como la literatura y el discurso que se construye sobre las andanzas de estas mujeres contribuyen a mantener un orden que ya empezaba a mostrar senales de deterioro.

Picaresca literaria: estrategias alarconianas de reapropiación en "El Amigo de la Muerte"

Abstract: El estudio sobre ��El Amigo de la Muerte�� (1852), de Pedro Antonio de Alarco n, se ha desarrollado hasta la fecha alrededor de dos debates especificos: su conexion con la tradicion oral europea y su discutida adscripcion al genero fantastico. Dichas aproximaciones han dado frutos provechosos, pero limitados, ya que se han visto mediatizadas por expectativas tomadas de parametros predeterminados ajenos al texto. En este articulo, tras una revision somera de ambos debates, me enfoco en la funcion central del subtexto antigalicista y en las estrategias de reapropiacion literaria localizables dentro del relato. Como propongo demostrar, los rasgos especificos que caracterizan ��El Amigo de la Muerte��, y que se desvian tanto del modelo folclo rico como de formulaciones estandarizadas de lo fantastico, proceden del deseo del autor de contrarrestar el influjo frances por medio de la critica explicita y la readopcion estrategica en coordenadas nacionales del picaro Gil Blas de Alain-Rene Lesage.

Punctum-Punk-Punctum: On the Poetry of Martín Gambarotta

Abstract: The 2011 republication of Martin Gambarotta's 1996 poetry collection, Punctum, offers the opportunity for new readers to approach this seminal and striking volume, one that was for some time unavailable. Furthermore, it offers the opportunity to reflect on the complex poetics of a collection that, despite its initial impression of a stark hermeticism or even banality, offers a range of literary, poetic, and political implications. Moreover, it is a collection that, alongside Sergio Raimondi's Poesia civil, represents the surprising variety of so-called 1990s, or objetivista, poetry in Argentina, and whose unexpected literary complexity runs counter to easy periodizations of Argentine literature. There is, though, a mismatch between the effectiveness of Gambarotta's poems and the apparent banality of much of the text. Despite reusing cliches and slogans from the contemporary media, Gambarotta's collection creates striking thematic, sonic, and visual effects on the reader.

La escritura como marca y máscara del significante ausente: Leonardo Padura y la visible ausencia de Guillermo Cabrera Infante

Abstract: Leonardo Padura es un autor fundamentalmente reconocido como innovador del genero policial o neopolicial cubano. En mi analisis, sin embargo, enfoco las estrategias explicitas e implicitas con las que se inscribe dentro de la historia literaria cubana y recupera un pasado largamente negado por la censura oficial de la isla. Me refiero en especial a su velada relacion con uno de los mas importantes autores cubanos del exilio, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, implicitamente presente en La neblina del ayer (2005) y El hombre que amaba a los perros (2009). Analizo la tecnica utilizada por Padura de ''negar la negacion'' e interpreto su escritura como mascara que visibiliza lo que parece esconder al imitar el mecanismo del ocultamiento. Intento demostrar que, de esta manera, al circunscribir el significante ausente, Padura logra escenificar la paradoja de la representacion, continua las tecnicas escriturarias de Cabrera Infante e instala al autor exiliado como centro secreto en por lo menos dos de sus novelas.

Sergio González Rodríguez: literatura y pensamiento en la edad de la catástrofe

Abstract: Este articulo es un estudio del trabajo ensayistico de Sergio Gonzalez Rodriguez. En e´l se argumenta que, en libros como El centauro en el paisaje (1992) o De sangre y sol (2006), Gonzalez Rodriguez busca construir un nuevo espacio para la especificidad del pensamiento literario en el contexto de la contemporaneidad. Al invocar formas de pensamiento esoterico y recuperar ideas sobre la modernidad literaria, su trabajo sigue el de autores como Roberto Calasso y Claudio Magris en la reconfiguracion de problemas como el cosmopolitismo y la ideologia literaria en la epoca contemporanea.

Memoria e identidad (auto)biográfica en La ninfa inconstante de Guillermo Cabrera Infante

Abstract: espanolEn su ultima y postuma novela, La ninfa inconstante (2008), Guillermo Cabrera Infante presenta un retorno a La Habana antes de la Revolucion cubana. Este articulo busca movilizar las estrategias de la autobiografia, la memoria y la autoficcion para comprender la reescritura que el autor hace de sus memorias en una forma novelistica. La memoria se utiliza como herramienta para acceder al pasado y reescribirlo, buscando superar o cuestionar las ideologias del Estado, sea este comunista o capitalista. Usando el modelo teorico elaborado por Svetlana Boym en su trabajo sobre la nostalgia, leo La ninfa inconstante como un retorno nostalgico al pasado que busca resignificar la historia de Cuba antes y durante la Revolucion, crear un lieux de memoire que testificara para una historia alternativa de Cuba, asicomo servir de ejemplo para que otros exiliados cubanos y no cubanos (re)creen sus propios espacios fuera de la historia oficial, sin necesidad de desafiarla abiertamente. EnglishIn his last, posthumous novel, La ninfa inconstante, Guillermo Cabrera Infante presents a return to Havana before the Cuban Revolution. This article seeks to mobilize the strategies of autobiography, memory and autofiction to understand the author�s rewriting of his memoirs in a novelistic form. Memory is used as a tool to access and rewrite the past, seeking to bypass or question state ideologies, be they communist or capitalist. Using the theoretical model of Svetlana Boym�s work on nostalgia, I read the novel as a nostalgic return to a past that seeks to resignify the present history of Cuba before and during the Revolution; to create a lieux de memoire that will testify for an alternative history of Cuba as well as serve as an example for other Cuban and non-Cuban exiles to (re)create their own spaces outside of official history without defying it openly.

Rufino Blanco Fombona y las ambivalencias posmodernistas: el caso de los Cuentos americanos

Abstract: This article argues that Rufino Blanco Fombona's short stories, in particular Cuentos americanos, are a fundamental example of his ambiguities vis-a-vis Spanish American modernismo Although his attacks on Ruben Dario were precisely articulated in his memoirs and essays, Blanco Fombona's fictions are heavily indebted to his modernista roots, and especially to his first contacts with nationalistic motifs in the work of several Venezuelan modernistas The ultimate aim of this discussion is to challenge the rigidity with which traditional historiography differentiates modernismo and criollismo A more nuanced approach to this moment in literary history allows us to better understand how aesthetic ideologies are manipulated by authors and critics to distribute and accumulate symbolic power in the field of cultural production

Los poetas apócrifos de Max Aub by Maria Rosell (review)

Abstract: ROSELL, MARIA. Los poetas apocrifos de Max Aub. Valencia: Universitat de Valencia, 2012.143 pp.At least since the advent of modernism, the relationship between writers and historians of literature has been a complicated one, perhaps not unlike the relationship between the police and the Mafia. It is the critics who, in principle, control the authors' entry into, and place within, the canon. Yet writers tend to display a barely veiled disdain for the bean-counting bureaucrats of the academy, trying their best to mock and undermine the professors' much-too-neat categories and attempts at periodization. Fiction writers have plenty of tools at their disposal to confuse their readers, academic or not. The sprawling operating system that we call the novel comes with centuries' worth of open-source apps designed to throw readers off track, from gender-bending pseudonyms and unreliable narrators to found manuscripts and spurious footnotes. Lyrical poetry, on the other hand, appears to have less room-perhaps a lower tolerance-for this kind of masquerade-ball playfulness. If fiction is about inserting as many filters as possible between the author's self and the final text, readers of lyrical poetry have come to expect direct access to the poet's authentic core. As Maria Rosell points out in this short but at times thought-provoking book, even after modernism and postmodernism we continue anachronistically to impute to the artistic object an "aura casi religiosa" based on "la autenticidad y la originalidad" (132).Naturally, to the mischievous-minded, the relative rigidity of these generic expectations is a tempting invitation to mess with their underlying presuppositions. It is the very assumption of authenticity, after all, that allows for the creation of apocrypha in the first place. As Rosell writes, "para probar que alguien es un artista autentico, necesita mostrar que es capaz de dominar la delicada operacion de fabricar la inautenticidad" (132). Max Aub proved a master at this test. As if his literary, cultural, and linguistic profile wasn't kaleidoscopic enough-born in Paris in 1903 of German-Jewish parents, he moved to Valencia at age 11, worked as one of the Republic's cultural operators in Paris during the Civil War, and spent most of his adult life as an exiled Spanish writer in Mexico-he further multiplied his authorship through geography and time in Antologia traducida (1963, 1972) and Imposible Sinai, which he began to write in 1967 in response to the Six-Day War, and which was published posthumously in 1982. Similarly mischievous were his invented biographies Luis Alvarez Petrena (1934,1965,1971) and Jusep Torres Campalans (1958).True to its subject matter, Los poetas apocrifos de Max Aub has a misleading title. For one thing, the book dedicates much more space to other poets' uses of apocrypha than to Aub's. Spanning Spanish, French, and Portuguese, we read about Fernando Pessoa, Prosper Merimee, Andre Gide, Paul Valery, Miguel de Unamuno, Valery Larbaud, Antonio Machado, Federico Garcia Lorca, Felipe Benitez Reyes, Agustin Delgado, Luis Mateo Diez, and Jose Maria Merino. For another thing, it uses Aub's and others' work as a springboard for a series of more general questions and reflections about authenticity, authorship, and literary history: "?se puede considerar la existencia de una historia de lo falso en las letras hispanicas contemporaneas, definiendo claramente lo falso como toda practica cuyo origen o autor difieran del pretendido?" Rosell wonders; "si consideramos que lo falso es lo no verdadero, todo el arte queda implicado en esta percepcion que conlleva apreciaciones de tipo moral dirigidas al ambito creativo" (15). The book's relative brevity and purposely unfocused, almost sprawling structure mean that Rosell rarely does more than scratch the surface of the texts and authors she deals with; in that sense, the book itself reads like a brief introduction or an anthology. …

Ovidian Lyric Voice in the Iberian Baroque

Abstract: The present study is an analysis of the ways in which Ovid�s account of the myth of Echo and Narcissus (Metamorphoses vv. 357�401) serves as a foundation for models of sonority and voice within Iberian Baroque aesthetics. In more specific terms, I argue that these models enabled seventeenth-century Iberian (and Ibero-American) poets�especially Luis de Gongora and those poets in dialogue with his work�to make strategic use of gendered discourse at both the semantico-referential and pragmatic levels of signification. Grounding my analysis in a close reading of selected works by Luis de Gongora, Soror Violante do Ceu, and Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, I point to the implementation of specific poetic elements (such as hyperbaton, enjambment, and rima abrazada) which constitute a mode of poetic composition that works in large measure to foreground prosody over semantic and syntactic order. The result is a �poetics of Echo� that draws from a specific conception of Echo�s linguistic presence in the Ovidian version of the myth. I argue that a particularly Ovidian intersection of body, textuality, and voice emerges during the early seventeenth-century Ibero-Baroque poetry that I consider.

Homo sacer, soberanía e incesto en La vida es sueño

Abstract: Situada en el siglo XVII, en un momento de transicion entre dos tipos de soberania, La vida es sueno (1635), de Pedro Calderonde la Barca, escenifica el nuevo nomos politico que llega a Espana: la soberania absoluta y su estado de excepcion. Por tal razon, se puede ver en Segismundo el doble estatuto aporetico del homo sacer , quien encarna la aporia politica del derecho juridico moderno como Soberano y proscrito a la vez. En tanto “muerto vivo” que comporta una doble esencia, el personaje representa la borradura derridiana entre naturaleza y cultura. Esto permite explicar las sucesivas metamorfosis de Segismundo como monstruo, hombre lobo, Cristo/Anticristo, Kalumniator y Edipo, que prolongan el cuerpo mistico del rey al reproducir el mismo acto incestuoso de Basilio. El incesto parece ser, en efecto, una prerrogativa constante del Soberano a lo largo de la historia, una marca o estigma de su estado de excepcion.

Alogical Memory: thinking Beyond (Counter)hegemonic Postdictatorial Discourse in Beatriz Bracher's Não falei

Abstract: In the novel Nao falei , Beatriz Bracher engages with post-dictatorial memory in Brazil in ways that move beyond the denunciatory genres that have dominated literary production in the aftermath of dictatorship. Part of a younger generation of writers revisiting the cultural memory of dictatorships in the Southern Cone, Bracher offers new ways of reading the effects of dictatorship and resignifying these experiences in different social contexts. Building upon the critical work of such authors as Flora Sussekind, Idelber Avelar, and Nelly Richard, in dialogue with theoretical considerations on subalternity, hegemony, and discourse, in this essay I examine the ways in which Nao falei explores the limits of the discursive logic of memory in postdictatorial Brazil. I argue that Bracher offers a more critical engagement with postdictatorial memory than much recent cultural production by creating an alogical narrative space that destabilizes the discursive mechanisms that dominate the cultural politics of memory today.

A las "mal tajadas plumas": el antimodernismo de Ramón Franquelo

Abstract: espanolEn el marco de la recepcion del Modernismo hispanico no ha sido suficiente objeto de estudio el volumen Frases impropias, barbarismos, solecismos y extranjerismos de uso mas frecuente en la prensa y en la conversacion (1910), del malagueno Ramon Franquelo y Romero. El autor no desaprovecha las paginas de esta obra, concebida inicialmente como un libro que promueve el correcto uso del espanol, para atacar con dureza la literatura modernista, en la linea acida e hiriente de voces coetaneas como las de Antonio de Valbuena o el padre Mart?´n Blanco Garcia (Antonio de Valmala), entre otras. Sintesis de dos de los focos de mayor resistencia al controvertido movimiento literario �el ambito religioso y el purismo idiomatico�, el caso de Franquelo ofrece nuevas claves con las que continuar deshilvanando la enrevesada madeja del antimodernismo. EnglishIn the framework of Hispanic Modernist reception, the volumen by the Andalucian Ramon Franquelo y Romero entitled Frases impropias, barbarismos, solecismos y extranjerismos de uso mas frecuente en la prensa y en la conversacion (1910) has not been studied in depth. The book was initially conceived as a guide for the correct use of the Spanish language, but the author tries to take advantage of it by attacking modernist literature, following Antonio de Valbuena or Friar Martin Blanco�s harsh voices, among others. Ramon Franquelo represents two focal points against the controversial literary movement: religious setting and linguistic purism. Franquelo�s case offers new keys with which we can continue delving into antimodernism.

Sarmiento's Vida de Horacio Mann: translation, importation, and entanglement

Abstract: This article focuses on the broad sociopolitical implications of Sarmiento's translations of Northern Hemispheric texts and ideas into the South American context in Las escuelas and the author's correspondence with Mary Mann. Exploring the relationship between the two reformers�both of whom were interested in using education to prepare nonwhites for the duties of citizenship in a broadly defined "South"�in order to examine the entangled history of Argentina during the War of the Triple Alliance and the early Reconstruction-era United States, this article shows how Sarmiento puts his relationship with Mann to creative use in his effort to incorporate Argentina's popular classes into the national project through public education. Ultimately, the relationship between the two writers points to how the interplay between transnational conversations and local histories gives rise to the entanglement of imperialism and neocolonialism in the Americas during the second half of the nineteenth century.

Radical Politics and Experimental Film in Franco's Spain: Los encuentros de Pamplona, 1972

Abstract: The Encuentros de Pamplona of 1972 was the most important exhibit of avant-garde and experimental art that had ever taken place during Franco's dictatorship. Some of the world's most prominent artists, including John Cage, went to Spain to participate in this event. This article offers a reflection on the use of avant-garde and experimental art from the 1950s to the early 1970s in Spain. In the beginning, abstract art was accepted by Franco�s regime as a way of exporting a "liberal" and "modern" image of the dictatorship in art exhibitions. Yet the ambivalent nature of abstract experimental art made it possible to take these works as a silent protest against the regime. However, in the early 70s, a younger generation would shift their approach to experimental art forms, yet not reject them altogether: distanced by an attitude of cynicism toward the ability of film to bring about political change, they would appropriate and extend the avant-garde through parody and pastiche, thus marking the "fin de fiesta" of experimental art in Spain.

Order and Resistance in the Polemical and Catechetical Literature of Early Modern Spain (1515–1599): Christians, Muslims, and Moriscos

Abstract: One window into the social and cultural problems of the Morisco century in early modern Spain is polemical and catechetical literature. This tradition had its roots in the anti-Islamic polemic of the Middle Ages, born among the Mozarabs.1 It represents Muhammad, the Qur'an, and the Muslims as the opposite of everything Christian, thus categorizing the "enemy" and affirming Christianity. However, the reality was not so neat in the Iberian Peninsula, where Christians and Muslims lived together, and where identities were more fluid than the polemic allowed. While the polemical and catechetical work of the sixteenth century, too, attempts to impose categories through similar means, it is not a sterile remnant of its predecessors. As part of a project that viewed the conversion of these "wandering sheep" as a pastoral obligation, this literature reflects the tensions between the ideological categories of what is Christian versus Muslim and the lived reality of Old Christians, Muslims, and recent converts (the Moriscos). Four important examples of this discourse are Juan Andres's Confusion o confutacion de la secta Mahometica y del Alcoran (1515), Juan Luis Vives's fourth book, "Contra sectam Mahometi," in De veritate fidei christianae (1543), Pedro Guerra de Lorca's Catecheses mystagogicae pro aduenis ex secta Mahometana: ad parochos, et potestates (1586), and Juan de Ribera's Catechismo para los nuevamente convertidos de moros (1599).The present study asks what resources these texts employ to impose order onto reality, and how evidence of religious and cultural hybridity form part of this discourse. I have chosen these texts because they represent diverse perspectives on the Morisco problem: a converted aifaqui who became a Christian priest (Andres), a humanist (Vives), a doctor of theology (Lorca), and an archbishop (Ribera). These works span the sixteenth century, and their authors wrote at different stages of fluctuating policy towards this minority. As I show, these writers share in a medieval tradition, but they adapt it as they respond to contemporary pastoral, social, and political demands. Following the conquest of Granada, there is a sense of optimism in Andres's Confusion, and the climate of the Renaissance inspires Vives as he writes an enlightened dialogue for converting the Moors. However, Lorca's tone turns aggressive. After the second Alpujarras revolt (1568-1571) and subsequent expulsion, and in the spirit of Trent, the theologian advocates the incorporation of these New Christians through a heavy hand of catechism and assimilation. Finally, writing at the end of the century, Ribera shows a disenchanted attempt at evangelization as his pessimism inundates the dialogue of the Catechismo.Louis Cardaillac's Moriscos y cristianos serves as the basic reference to this literature. Cardaillac discusses the antagonism between Christians and Moriscos in terms of religion, as evidenced in polemical works by both groups. Nonetheless, he observes that " [ijnsistir sobre la importancia de este elemento religioso ... no implica . . . negar, claro esta, la importancia de otros factores . . . que tambien explican este enfrentamiento" (84). Cardaillac shows how the medieval polemic, Christian vs. Muslim, was adapted to the social reality of the sixteenth century (153, 233). Vicente Cantarino likewise emphasizes the continuity and adaptation of medieval polemic, and shows that this discourse "se confronta con modulos teoricos abstractos y generales," and that it seeks not so much to portray reality as to represent what reality "debia ser" ("Notas" 126). As the Christians advanced in the Reconquista and conversions from Islam to Christianity increased, the religious polemic incorporated "todos los aspectos de la vida cultural, lengua, costumbres, escritura," and conversion increasingly meant assimilation (133-34). Finally, with mass conversions and the "end" of Islam in Iberia, the polemic changed, and a pastoral tone dominated such works as Bernardo Perez de Chinchon's Antialcorano (1528) and Martin de Ayala's Doctrina Christiana en lengua Arauiga y castellana (1566) (138-39). …

Violencia de género en la narrativa cubana contemporánea: deseo femenino y masculinidad hegemónica

Abstract: This paper examines the representation of gender violence in four contemporary Cuban novels: Mascaras by Leonardo Padura, Rio Quibu by Ronaldo Menendez, 100 botellas en una pared by Ena Lucia Portela, and Todos se van by Wendy Guerra. The analysis focuses on how domestic violence is conceived in these texts as a manifestation of the systemic violence that has shaped Cuban society. Furthermore, the paper considers the differences between the novels written by men and those written by women, suggesting that the gendered experience of the world has an impact on the experience of violence and in its textual representation.

The Spanish American crónica modernista, Temporality, and Material Culture: Modernismo's Unstoppable Presses by Andrew Reynolds (review)

Abstract: Binotti’s text closes with a conclusion that summarizes the various ways in which a uniquely Spanish cultural capital was produced during the Renaissance, a cultural production that was at once influenced by and set against similar practices in Italy. In these closing pages, Binotti describes how the artists and intellectuals whose works she examines articulated the contours of a culture that simultaneously reimagined its own past and projected itself into modernity through its assertion of its own historical difference. A vital component of this cultural regeneration was what Binotti calls ‘‘the disciplinary reassessments fostered by humanists such as Morales and Aldrete’’ (182). In this way, Binotti underscores the significance of her objects of study for her own scholarly methodology. Much like the authors, editors, and publishers she examines, Binotti is interested in the material production of the past as a means of transforming the cultural present. However, she is also determined to reorient current views of early modern Spanish and European culture. At the close of her introduction to the volume, Binotti notes ‘‘the hostilities which tenaciously persist between scholarly disciplines’’ devoted to early modern studies and laments the lack even of ‘‘substantive exchange across language differences within the same field’’ (12). Binotti’s book explicitly seeks to redress the limitations inherent in modern scholarly divisions, and in doing so, to reconfigure what she calls the ‘‘disciplinary prerogatives’’ which are both produced by and, in turn, compel such institutional distinctions (12). While her material and textual history of early modern canon formation and her analyses of the long-neglected Morales and Aldrete are highly informative, perhaps more than any of the individual studies Binotti presents in her book, it is the clear and innovative manner in which she ties them together, revealing the complex interweaving of diverse modes of cultural production which in conjunction gave form and substance to early modern Spanish culture, that most merits the reader’s attention.

San Jerónimo en el eje de la polémica en torno de la Carta atenagórica de Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz

Abstract: espanolEste articulo se ocupa de la polemica en torno de la Carta atenagorica de Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz de 1690 y sus repercusiones en los ultimos anos de vida de la religiosa. Los textos que forman parte de la polemica, tanto a favor como en contra de Sor Juana, construyen sus argumentos sobre la base de la autoridad y tradicion de San Jeronimo, las cuales promovian el estudio de las mujeres en el marco de una estricta vida piadosa. Jeronimo es una figura fundamental para la comprension de la polemica, pues los argumentos a favor de la participacion de las mujeres en la vida intelectual cristiana son utilizados por los autores de La fineza mayor y del Discurso apologetico y por la propia Sor Juana en su famosa Carta al Padre Nunez. La naturaleza conflictiva de los estudios de Juana Ines durante sus ultimos anos y la autoridad de San Jeronimo se encuentran reflejadas en testimonios hallados recientemente, como la Carta de Puebla de 1691. EnglishThis article explores the polemic around Sor Juana's Carta atenagorica of 1690 and its consequences for her last years. The texts participating in this controversy�both favorable and unfavorable to Sor Juana�base many of their arguments on Saint Jerome's authority and tradition, which promotes the right of women to study under the strict observance of a pious life. Saint Jerome is a key figure for the understanding of the polemic since his thought on the participation of women in Christian intellectual life is used by the authors of La fineza mayor, the Discurso apologetico, and by Sor Juana herself in her famous Carta al Padre Nunez. The conflictive nature of Sor Juana's studies during her last years and Saint Jerome's authority are also reflected in new testimonies such as the recently discovered Carta de Puebla of 1691.

Views of the Cordilleras and Monuments of the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas: A Critical Edition by Alexander Von Humboldt

Abstract: Humboldt, Alexander von. Views of the Cordilleras and Monuments of the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas: A Critical Edition. Ed. Vera M. Kutzinski and Ottmar Ette. Trans. J. Ryan Poynter. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2012. xl + 618 pp.The Prussian polymath geographer and naturalist Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) has long been something of a household name to students of Latin American literature and history. By contrast, his legacy among Anglo-American readers has suffered somewhat from the nationalist parochialism that has long characterized the North American understanding of "America" both as a geographical and as a historical concept. This parochialism is easily traced to the rise of an aggressive US expansionism in the mid-nineteenth century, which militated against Humboldt's cosmopolitan vision and hemispheric understanding of America's history. The fact that none of his works were originally written in English presumably did not help. His works were gradually marginalized in the United States, even though in his own day they were still widely admired by such prominent Anglo-Americans as Thomas Jefferson, himself a cosmopolitan who had welcomed Humboldt as his guest during the latter's visit to Washington in 1804. If Humboldt is currently seeing something of a revival in historical and literary scholarship in the United States, it is largely thanks to the transatlantic and interAmericanist collaboration of Vera Kutzinski, a professor of English and Comparative Literature at Vanderbilt, and Ottmar Ette, a professor of Romance Languages at the University of Potsdam (Germany), as well as the research team assembled at the University of Potsdam. This collaboration has already resulted in a number of important recent publications, including the collection Alexander von Humboldt and the Americas (2013), which features essays by literary and cultural historians of science as well as several primary documents; a new edition of Humboldt's Political Essay on the Island of Cuba (2011); and the first complete English edition and translation of the Vues des cordilleres et monuments des peuples indigenes de l'Amerique, one of the works based on Humboldt's extensive five-year travels through the Americas from 1799 to 1804 in the company of the French botanist Aime Bonpland (1773-1858). The text was originally published in French in seven folio installments between 1810 and 1813 as part of his monumental Voyage aux regions equinoxiales du nouveau continent, which appeared between 1805 and 1838 in a total of thirty volumes, and which stands today as the origin of modern tropical zoology, botany, geography, and geology. Vues was a sort of a travel catalog structured into sixtynine "views," each of which consisted of an engraving based on the travelers' sketches of New World natural landscapes, cityscapes, indigenous monuments and cultural artifacts, and Humboldt's detailed observations and encyclopedic commentaries. For example, in his "view" of the Cotopaxi, the engraving based on Humboldt's sketch of the famous South American volcano stands at the center of his detailed scientific descriptions, his measurements comparing its gigantic proportions to the greatest volcanoes of the Old World, a history of the awesome spectacles presented by its eruptions, and the cultural significance attributed to it in indigenous Andean cultures. Not all of the "views" originate with Humboldt's experiences during his American travels, however. Thus, a plate depicting a Mexica codex located at the Vatican Library forms the center of his meditations on the nature of various systems of "writing" (hieroglyphic, alphabetical, etc.), on what they can tell us about the spread of cultures and languages across the globe, and about what he saw as the universal evolution of human cultures.The present volume reproduces all sixty-nine plates that adorned the original edition and the original page references in the margins; the English translation by J. …

José Juan Tablada y el ideograma kotobuki: sus fuentes y su uso en "Li-Po"

Abstract: Uno de los efectos visuales mas llamativos de la coleccion ideografica Li-Po y otros poemas (1920), de Jose Juan Tablada (1871-1945), es la incorporacion del ideograma sino-japones kotobuki a la composicion titular. Mucho se ha especulado sobre el empleo de este caracter, y se ha debatido si Tablada conocia o no los usos y acepciones del simbolo dentro de los contextos asiaticos originales. La forma grafica no tradicional que luce el ideograma dentro del poema ha llevado a algunos a cuestionar tambien el entendimiento que llego a tener el mexicano de los sistemas orientales de escritura. El presente estudio, basado en un analisis de materiales del Archivo Grafico de Tablada y de su biblioteca personal, examina las fuentes que el poeta tuvo a su disposicion para informar su apreciacion semantica y estetica del ideograma, y ofrece una revaluacion del uso del caracter kotobuki en su homenaje verbo-visual al poeta chino Li-Po. Abstract: One of the most stunning visual effects included in the 1920 volume of ideographic poetry, Li-Po y otros poemas , by Jose Juan Tablada (1871-1945), is the incorporation of the Sino-Japanese ideogram kotobuki in the title composition. Critics have long speculated on the significance of this character to the poem and have debated whether or not Tablada was even cognizant of the symbol's actual meaning and uses within Asiatic contexts. Furthermore, the nontraditional form in which the character is graphically reproduced in Li-Po has led some critics to question the Mexican's understanding of Oriental writing systems. This article, based on an analysis of materials from Tablada's Graphic Archive and personal library, examines the sources that the poet had at his disposal to inform his appreciation of the ideogram's semantics and aesthetics, and offers a reevaluation of his use of the specific character kotobuki in his verbal-visual homage to the Chinese poet Li-Po.

La literatura de embajada como uso ideológico "nacional" del espacio: del testimonio combativo a la alegoría política

Abstract: Este articulo propone un estudio diferenciador de la "literatura de embajada" dentro de la literatura "nacional" o del bando franquista durante la Guerra Civil espanola. Sostenemos que el valor de esta literatura, que generalmente es testimonio de asilados y tiene como tema principal la larga reclusion y el cerco de un grupo humano diverso en el espacio reducido de una embajada extranjera, va mas alla del mero caracter testimonial o denunciatorio. Por un lado, este espacio se convirtio en lugar retorico-politico de resistencia (alcazarizacion) y de arremetida contra la Espana republicana y los enemigos exteriores. Por el otro, las obras analizadas, como microcosmos humano, presentan una dimension etica que pone a prueba los limites morales del hombre, y desde la cual se condenan politicamente opciones como el comunismo o se justifica una figura autoritaria ordenancista. Finalmente, contra lo esperado, la diversidad de la "literatura de embajada" seria un buen boton de muestra de las fisuras que desde el inicio tuvo el cuerpo ideologico y social que apoyo el levantamiento de Francisco Franco. Abstract: This article intends to characterize "embassy literature" within the frame of the "national" literature produced by Franco's supporters during the Spanish Civil War. I argue that the former literary production, typically a testimony of political refugees who are secluded in the limited space of a foreign embassy for long periods of time, moves beyond a testimonial or denunciative character. On one hand, this embassy space transforms into a rhetorical-political site of resistance and combat against the Republic and the Franco faction's exterior enemies. On the other hand, the works I analyze offer an ethical dimension that highlights the moral limits of human beings. This dimension is used by the authors politically to condemn options such as communism or to justify the need for an authoritarian figure to maintain order. Finally, contrary to expectations, the diversity of "embassy literature" stands out as an excellent example of the divisions within the very ideological and social base that supported Franco's uprising.