Showing papers in "Hispanic Review in 2015"

Disrupting Nineteenth-Century Dichotomies of Gender: Reading and Imagination in Emilia Pardo Bazán's La madre Naturaleza

Abstract: This essay contends that Emilia Pardo Bazan’s novel La madre Naturaleza (1887) reflects the author’s fundamental preoccupation with the state of women’s education in Spain. I argue that the narrative portrayal of the novel’s central character, Gabriel Pardo de la Lage, unravels nineteenth-century gendered assumptions of what—or who—constitutes an ideal reader. Despite his extensive rational education, Gabriel Pardo possesses an overactive imagination that, when read in conjunction with contemporary social commentaries of women’s education, emasculates the artilleryman. The novel demonstrates that neither reason nor imagination is indelibly linked to gender, thus problematizing nineteenth-century discourses precluding women from male-coded rational education, or instruccion.

China como patriótico desahogo: usos de la alteridad en los Viajes del chino Dagar-Li-Kao de Fernando Garrido

Abstract: Como colofon a una trayectoria inquieta, Fernando Garrido publico en 1880, bajo el seudonimo de El Ermitano de las Penunelas, la novela Viajes del chino Dagar-Li-Kao por los paises barbaros de Europa, Espana, Francia, Inglaterra y otros. Garrido, figura clave en el nacimiento del socialismo espanol del siglo XIX, recurre al viaje ficticio de un escritor chino por Espana para desplegar un dispositivo formal desde el cual lanzar una rotunda critica a la convulsa sociedad espanola. Mientras en Europa se esta produciendo una intensa racializacion de las representaciones de lo oriental, la imagen positiva de lo chino de la que se sirve Garrido es historicamente singular, a la vez que maleable. Significante consolidado de significado inestable, en los Viajes del chino Dagar-Li-Kao "China acomoda la alteridad al servicio de un patriotico desahogo", con Espana como autentico nucleo de interes.

Relaciones de sucesos en romance impresas en pliegos de cordel (siglo XVI)

Abstract: Pese a que existen numerosas investigaciones en torno a las relaciones de sucesos en castellano, el estudio de las formas metricas en las que se componen estas obras ha sido un aspecto bastante desatendido. El objetivo del presente trabajo es ofrecer un panorama de las relaciones de sucesos en verso que conservamos del siglo XVI, para luego fijar la atencion en aquellas obras que estan compuestas en la forma metrica del romance. De ese modo, es posible llegar a una serie de conclusiones sobre la metrica elegida por los copleros populares para componer estas piezas y su relacion con cuestiones tales como la tematica abordada.

Animalidad y sexualidad en tres casos monstruosos de la crónica peruana (siglos XVI y XVII)

Abstract: espanolEste articulo explora tres casos de monstruos descritos en la cronica peruana de los siglos XVI y XVII, en las obras de Juan de Castellanos, Pedro Cieza de Leon y Pedro Ordonez de Ceballos. A traves de ellos se presentan algunas tradiciones literarias del monstruo, incluyendo las figuras del gigante y el hombre salvaje. El articulo muestra como estos monstruos de la cronica peruana ofrecen una inusitada mezcla de genealogias, en la que tienden a disolverse los limites entre lo biblico, los tratados de historia natural, la teratologia, las novelas de caballeria, los libros de viajes y las tradiciones orales indigenas, entre otros tipos de textos, con el fin de crear la otredad americana. EnglishThis article explores three cases of monsters that appeared in Peruvian chronicles of the 16th and 17th centuries in the works of Juan de Castellanos, Pedro Cieza de Leon and Pedro Ordonez de Ceballos. Through these cases we see some literary traditions of the monster, including the figures of the giant and the wild man. The article shows how these monsters of Peruvian chronicles offer an unforeseen mix of genealogies, in which the lines between the biblical, natural history treatises, teratology, chivalric novels, travel books, and indigenous oral traditions, among other types of texts, tend to dissolve, with the goal of creating American otherness.

"Swimming in Olive Oil": North Africa and the Hispanic Caribbean in the Poetry of Víctor Hernández Cruz

Abstract: This essay examines selected poems from The Mountain in the Sea by US Puerto Rican poet Victor Hernandez Cruz, who sets out to complicate Puerto Rican, Spanish, and US notions of cultural identity. It demonstrates how Hernandez Cruz is tropicalizing the Maghreb through the juxtaposition of and interplay between languages (Spanish, English, and Arabic), as well as imagery linked to Morocco, Spain, Puerto Rico, and New York. It also shows how the subversiveness of the collection reaches a new dimension through its depiction of the North African presence within the geopolitical borders of the United States in our post-9/11 context.

Embodying the Spanish Avant-Garde: Disability and Gender in Ramón Gómez de la Serna

Abstract: This article will propose a reading of some of Gomez de la Serna’s most relevant avant-garde texts to articulate a bodily literature; that is, a literature where the body is emphasized. The growing importance of the human body is one of the defining characteristics of the international avant-gardes at large, and of Gomez de la Serna in particular. In that regard, the main interest of this essay will be the embodiment of death and disease in Los muertos, las muertas y otras fantasmagorias (1935) and Senos (1917), as well as the fluidity of gender roles, as seen in “La mujer vestida de hombre” (1927).

Espacios entre espacios en La forja: una cartografía íntima de Arturo Barea

Abstract: El articulo analiza los espacios mas proximos al sujeto de la novela autobiografica de Arturo Barea: La forja , primera parte de la trilogia La forja de un rebelde . Esos espacios—el acceso a la buhardilla en la que vive su madre, el balcon de la casa de sus tios, el barrio del Avapies y los pinares de la Moncloa, todos ellos en Madrid—comparten el rasgo de que son “limites” o “espacios entre espacios”. Esta caracteristica se relaciona, en el marco de los actuales estudios sobre la liminaridad ( liminality ), con el autorretrato primero que Barea propone desde el exilio: individuo entre clases sociales, pero tambien entre la edad infantil y la edad adulta, y en el momento en que escribe, entre dos paises (Reino Unido y Espana) y dos lenguas (ingles y espanol). Asi se postula como sujeto representativo para tratar de esclarecer la raiz de la Guerra Civil Espanola. ABSTRACT: This essay analyzes the spaces surrounding the main character of Arturo Barea’s autobiography, La forja [ The Forge ] (the first part of La forja de un rebelde [ The Forging of a Rebel ]). These spaces are the following: the access to the attic where his mother lives, the balcony of his uncle’s house, the Avapies quarter and the Moncloa pine forest—all of them located in Madrid. They all share the fact that they are “limits,” “spaces between spaces.” In line with current studies on “liminality,” this feature is studied in connection with the first self-portrait that Barea delineates from exile: an individual between social classes, but also between childhood and adulthood, and, at the moment he writes, between two countries (United Kingdom and Spain) and two languages (English and Spanish). Therefore, he presents himself as a key subject in the attempt to understand the root causes of the Spanish Civil War.

El naturalismo en O cortiço de Aluísio Azevedo

Abstract: This paper seeks to analyze Aluisio Azevedo’s Brazilian novel O Cortico (1890) by discussing its mimetic relation with French naturalism, and particularly with Emile Zola’s work. For that purpose, the paper discusses some key elements of French naturalism that will be used in the analysis of Azevedo’s novel. The analysis shows the singular function of this Brazilian novel and its differences from its French model, presenting an ambiguous, critical vision of the modernization process. resumen: Este trabajo analiza la novela brasilena O cortico (1890), de Aluisio Azevedo, desde una perspectiva que pone en entredicho su relacion mimetica con el naturalismo frances y, en particular, con la obra de Emile Zola. Para ello se exponen algunos elementos claves del proyecto de ese movimiento literario, para luego indagar en la obra de Azevedo y en su funcion singular, que la diferencia del supuesto modelo frances, a traves de una presentacion ambigua y critica del proceso de modernizacion capitalista en Brasil.

Anorexia as Idealization: Clemente Pereda's Protest Fast (Puerto Rico, 1934)

Abstract: In this essay, I argue that Clemente Pereda's works of art (including his protest fast from 1934) are examples of a necessary process both at the level of the individual and at the level of the community that sublimates what Julia Kristeva calls abjection: an idealization of the link between self and other that is constituted of both symbolic and physical material. I emphasize the need for the social sphere to continue to generate the conditions of possibility for this necessary process, to support works of art like Clemente Pereda's fast, which worked as an antidote to the anorectic and suicidal effects of colonialism.Todo lo sacrificaba por la patria, todo por el honor, todo por las ideas.Es una forma de locura.-Clemente PeredaThirty years of scholarship about the effect on Puerto Rican cultural production by the modernizing impulse from the 1930s to the 70s have included critical works that successfully combine postcolonial theory with psychoanalysis.1 This significant body of criticism is a testament to the power of Frantz Fanon's (1925-1961) claim that the staying force of colonialism cannot be understood without studying the effect of colonial history on the psyche of the colonized. In other words, this scholarship has found it helpful to return to the technical vocabulary of psychoanalysis in order to explain the degree to which a colonial form of power or logic is still at work in what appears to be a postcolonial or a neocolonial moment. This is not to say that this scholarship has taken psychoanalytic theory at face value. In fact, these scholars repeat Fanon's criticism of the tendency of psychoanalytic theory to disregard such limiting constraints as colonial history and race. However, this scholarship also insists on an analysis that combines the history of colonial struggle (a history of the conflict between actors or social groups and their economic, social, cultural, and political interests) with an account of the imaginary forces at play. According to these critics, such forces subtend not only the struggle, but also the very constitution of these actors and social groups. And their analyses go some distance in explaining the repetition of a colonial logic that will not stop.This scholarship has also gone beyond Fanon in its emphasis on a dimension of the repeating colonial logic that Fanon was resistant to considering. Drawing mainly from queer theory, and in particular from the work of Judith Butler, and from her influential interpretations of Rivierian, Lacanian and Kristevan psychoanalytic theory in Gender Trouble, this scholarship has redeployed concepts like the "heteronormative matrix," the "Phallic economy," and "abjection" respectively in order to explain the generative place of homophobia in the political unconscious of Puerto Rico and its repeating colonial logic. While it would be beyond the scope of this paper to explain how this scholarship appropriates and reinscribes Butler's use of these psychoanalytic concepts, I would like to stress that, generally speaking, they all repeat a central tenet of Butler's analysis: namely her understanding of the nature of power. And on the whole, they place Butler's understanding of the nature of power at the center of their different analyses of the effect of colonial relations on cultural production.In her book, Butler finds a free-floating "refusal" of love at the center of the logic of representative structuralist and poststructuralist theories (as well as of their feminist counter-discourses). She also describes this refusal as an unstable interdiction, a speech act that is a "dissimulation" as well as a "selfsubjection," an "injunction" that is simultaneously a prohibition and a disavowal (41, 49,57). Further, she even finds this unstable interdiction at the center of the process that motivates paradigmatic shifts like the move from structuralism to poststructuralism. This injunction or performative speech act is (for Butler) a "differentiating differance" (40) that remains repressed in the unconscious of these systems of thought. …

Dialécticas de la novela moderna: realismo y tipología narrativa en Fortunata y Jacinta

Abstract: Fortunata y Jacinta pone en evidencia que gran parte de la sociedad del Madrid del ultimo tercio del siglo XIX se caracterizo por una sensibilidad idealista en sintonia con la literatura popular de la epoca. Es por ello que el folletin constituye un intertexto indispensable en la novela, pues si bien Benito Perez Galdos era consciente de que Espana habia perdido su grandeza preterita, muchos de sus habitantes seguian actuando sobre la base de ideales abstractos y valores caducos. El rechazo a esta (est)etica pasatista es perspicuo en el episodio del falso Pituso, donde se parodia la imaginacion melodramatica y uno de sus motivos predilectos: la anagnorisis. Subrayando la dificultad de alcanzar verdades irrefutables en la modernidad, la novela pitusiana ofrece un conjunto de reflexiones sobre tipologia narrativa y el papel del realismo que arrojan luz sobre el ideal artistico de Galdos. Abstract: Fortunata y Jacinta explores the dialectics between idealism and low-brow literature in late-19th-century Madrid. Hence, the popular folletin constitutes an indispensable intertext in the novel, since, despite Galdos's awareness that Spain had lost its imperial grandeur, many of its inhabitants continued to live according to abstract ideals and outdated values. His rejection of such an anachronistic worldview is perspicuous in the falso Pituso episode, in which the narrative parodies melodramatic imagination and one of its archetypical moments: the recognition scene. Questioning the existence of irrefutable truths in the modern world, the novela pitusiana offers several considerations on narrative typology and the role of Realism, which shed light on Galdos's aesthetic ideal.

Alexander Von Humboldt Y Ramón De la Sagra : Navegación Y Viaje Al Interior En la Invención De Cuba En El Siglo XIX

Abstract: Dentro de la genealogia del reformismo espanol, los viajes de Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) y Ramon de la Sagra (1798-1871) constituyeron dos momentos claves en la produccion de un imaginario moderno sobre Cuba y el Caribe. Los periplos de ambos naturalistas se produjeron a raiz de las reformas borbonicas llevadas a cabo en la segunda mitad del siglo XVIII y principios del XIX. Como ha senalado persuasivamente Manuel Lucena, el programa reformista se puso en practica mediante la proliferacion de instituciones ilustradas y expediciones cientificas; en ese sentido, el viaje se consolido como instrumento de intervencion politica en los territorios distantes del Imperio. Los viajes de Humboldt y Sagra iban encaminados a reinsertar la Monarquia espanola en una geopolitica imperial moderna. En el caso del Baron, su periplo quedaba inscrito dentro de un plan de reformulacion imperial que intentaba fortalecer el dominio espanol en America frente al auge de otros imperios como el ingles. Su travesia por el continente se extendio de 1799 a 1804 y sento un precedente unico en las relaciones modernas entre Espana, las colonias americanas y los Estados europeos. Por primera vez, a un extranjero se le permitia explorar los dominios del Imperio espanol (Pratt).En ese periodo, Humboldt visito Cuba en dos ocasiones. La primera estadia se prolongo del 19 de diciembre de 1800 al 15 de marzo de 1801. La segunda tuvo lugar entre el 19 de marzo y el 29 de abril de 1804; ambas suman un periodo total de casi cuatro meses y medio. Durante su primera visita, Humboldt navego por la costa sur de la isla desde el puerto de Batabailo hasta Trinidad. La travesia maritima, recogida en el Ensayo politico sobre la isla de Cuba (1827), constituye un relato de viajes apegado al paradigma de la navegacion, en el que la figura del viajero se transforma en navegante. Es en ese viaje maritimo donde en varias ocasiones Humboldt se legitima en la tradicion de los conquistadores espanoles, invocando los nombres y las travesias de Cristobal Colon y Hernan Cortes por el mar Caribe. Para el viajero, "[ajquellos sitios [tenian] un atractivo que no [habia] en la mayor parte del Nuevo Mundo, porque [renovaban] recuerdos que [estaban] unidos a los nombres mas grandes de la monarquia espanola, a los de Cristobal Colon y Hernan Cortes" (233).1 El relato de viajes, localizado al final del Ensayo, proporciona una clave de lectura importante para entender la manera en que Humboldt concibe Cuba en una dimension esencialmente antillana, es decir, como parte de un espacio geocultural y geopolitico predominantemente africano a principios del siglo XIX.El periplo de Sagra, por su parte, se conecto con las regulaciones ratificadas por las cortes espanolas en 1822 para promover los viajes de naturalistas a Puerto Rico, Filipinas y Cuba. Ante la perdida de la America continental, la metropolis buscaba asegurar el pacto colonial con los ultimos enclaves del Caribe y el Pacifico. A diferencia de Humboldt, Sagra vivio en la isla desde 1823 hasta 1835. Durante ese periodo se desempeno como profesor de la catedra de Botanica-Agricultura, dirigio el Jardin Botanico de La Habana y fundo la revista Anales de Ciencias, Agricultura, Comercio y Artes. En 1859, realizo su ultimo viaje a la isla en busca de nuevos materiales para la que seria su monumental historia sobre Cuba. En esa ultima exploracion, Sagra sigue los pasos de Humboldt y alcanza el mismo punto geografico que su antecesor, pero usa la exploracion hacia el interior como nuevo paradigma epistemologico.2 Al repetir la travesia hasta Trinidad, Sagra propone la clave desde donde quiere ser pensado y reinventado en la historia cientifica del reformismo espanol. Su exploracion del interior, cuyo relato aparece en Relacion del ultimo viaje del autor (1861), constituye una especie de homenaje a Humboldt y, al mismo tiempo, se convierte en una manera de actualizar los saberes sobre Cuba. Pero a diferencia del Baron, Sagra postula una Cuba atlantica, "blanca" y no antillana. …

Samuel Putnam, cosmopolitismo y vanguardia española en Estados Unidos

Abstract: espanolEl presente articulo explora como se produjo la recepcion temprana de la vanguardia espanola en Estados Unidos a partir del analisis de la labor del critico norteamericano Samuel Putnam (1888–1950), y enmarca su obra dentro de una nueva forma de critica cosmopolita que alcanzo notoriedad en los anos veinte. Desde su posicion de expatriado en Paris, el trabajo de Putnam como traductor, resenista y editor lo convirtio en difusor y en defensor de la vanguardia europea, y entre sus intereses centrales se encontro la obra de autores como Rafael Alberti, Ernesto Gimenez Caballero o Benjamin Jarnes. El trabajo documenta la vision que ofrecio de la literatura espanola mas renovadora y como su posicion critica respecto a ella se modifico cuando, ya de vuelta en Estados Unidos en los treinta, Putnam reivindico un compromiso politico activo del intelectual. EnglishThis article explores the early reception of the Spanish avant-garde in the United States through the analysis of the work of the American literary critic Samuel Putnam (1888-1950), and frames his output as part of a new form of cosmopolitan criticism in fashion during the twenties. From his position as an expatriate in Paris, Putnam’s work as translator, reviewer, and editor made him a promoter and a publicist of the European avant-gardes, and he paid close attention to the writings of Alberti, Gimenez Caballero and Jarnes. The article documents the vision that Putnam offered of the most innovative Spanish literature and explains how his critical position was modified when he returned to the States in the thirties and advocated greater involvement of writers in politics.

José Donoso and the Monstrous Masculinities of Chile's Agrarian Reform

Abstract: By including queer characters who complicate or interrupt the seemingly inexorable progression forward of patriarchal ideas about lineage in his novels El lugar sin limites (1966) and El obsceno pajaro de la noche (1970), Jose Donoso denounces and destabilizes the underlying heteronormativity of two modernization movements of late sixties Latin America: Chile�s �model� agrarian reform movement, designed to be led by male figures firmly invested in heterosexual reproductive praxis, and the �Boom,� Latin America�s triumphal entree (albeit dominated by heterosexual men) into the pantheon of world literature. These novels, then, propose broader, more cosmopolitan tropes whose queer appropriations of folkloric, grotesque �monstrosity� question and possibly extend what it means to be an ideal subject of modernity, even as they stop short of advocating for the more radical critiques, further-reaching agrarian reforms, and increasingly experimental artistic aesthetics that would manifest themselves in Chile when the Unidad Popular took power in 1970.

A Woman's Political Answer to the cuestión social in Nineteenth-Century Spain

Abstract: This article argues the necessity to rethink the role of the politically committed female intellectual in nineteenth century Spain. Concepcion Arenal’s intervention on the cuestion social, her adaptation of the concept of “industrial education” and her use of legal rhetoric and of rhetorical devices typical of those applied by lawyers in the courtroom, serve as a point of departure to explain how the figure of the woman of letters can be understood as an agent of social reform in the most important social preoccupation of that time: the working masses and their relationship with industrialists.

Los años norteamericanos de Luis Cernuda by José Teruel

Abstract: TERUEL, JOSÉ!. Los anos norteamericanos de Luis Cernuda. Valencia: PreTextos, 2013. 266 pp.In Los anos norteamericanos de Luis Cernuda, Teruel's objective is as clear as it is ambitious: clarify the poetic production and image of Luis Cernuda during his years in exile in the United States and Mexico between 1947 and 1963. As Teruel rightly argues in the introduction, there is little doubt that Cernuda has been valorized as a "poeta del 27," and much of the interest surrounding his poetry has gravitated to the early years that run from the publication of Perfil del aire in 1927 to Como quien espera el alba of 1941-1944. ln Teruel's appraisal, however, Cernuda's later work is not only worthy of study in its own right, but it also illuminates and adds crucial perspective to the poet's complex poetic persona.Teruel's study is composed of an introduction and ten chapters and presents in chronological order Cernuda's life and poetry from his arrival at Mount Holyoke College in 1947 to his death in Mexico in 1963. Teruel makes clear in the introduction that his intention is to refute the well-worn argument that Cernuda's later poetic production exudes an aesthetic fatigue and an overall impoverishment of creativity. Likewise, he aims to demonstrate the unity of Cernuda's "obra completa" and to what extent his later poetry and meditations on self during his years of exile in fact dialogue with his earlier lyric endeavors. The remaining chapters articulate these distinct yet complementary aims, and they do so with precision and consistency while weaving together critical readings of Cernuda's poetry and a wealth of his correspondence and personal notes.One of the most illuminating aspects of Teruel's study is the manner in which it brings to the fore Cernuda's insecurities about his craft and, in particular, his image as poet. Beginning with his first revised collection of poems, Perfil del aire, Cernuda would fret and fume for the rest of his life over the way his poetry was read, interpreted, appraised, and ignored. Indeed, Perfil del aire was received with scant enthusiasm from Spain's intellectual community, and it even garnered an abundance of negative and hostile reviews. As Teruel sees it, Cernuda was never able to transcend this initial disappointment or the betrayal he endured from those he believed were his closest allies at the time (his mentor Pedro Salinas, to whom the book was dedicated, responded with a simple acknowledgement of receipt when Cernuda sent him a personally dedicated copy of it). The appearance of La invitacion a la poesia, Donde habita el olvido, Invocaciones, and the homage paid to Cernuda's poetry in El Sol in the years leading up to 1936 did little to ameliorate his hurt feelings and growing sense of disaffection with Spain's cultural milieu. Shortly after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, he was invited to deliver a series of lectures at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge that were scheduled over a period of a few months, but the war made it impossible for him to return to Spain. And so began his life in exile in 1938.For Teruel, Cernuda was consumed by a sense of exile. This was, in reality, only aggravated in 1938, for he had always felt somehow estranged and underestimated since the publication of Perfil del aire. It was these nagging feelings that generated the rich tension in his later work between past and present, ideality and reality, and sexual craving and platonic love. These sentiments also played a hand in the unpredictable dialectic that ruled Cernuda's life between place and displacement. More concretely, Cernuda's years of exile, as Teruel methodically documents, are characterized by constant movement, a constant shifting and transition between countries, lifestyles, and outlooks. In Teruel's words, "su errante, interina y zigzagueante vida lo llevo de la pasion por el Absoluto (con inicial mayuscula, como concebia su obra) a su relativismo desesperado" (30). …

Of Monsters and Parricides: The Politics of Textual Reproduction

Abstract: This article examines the narrative mobilization of gendered and biogenetic metaphors of translation in two contemporary novels that feature translators as protagonists: El congreso de literatura (1999) by Cesar Aira (Argentina) and Borges e os orangotangos eternos (2000) by Luis Fernando Verissimo (Brazil). Situating my analysis at the intersection of the �fictional turn� of Translation Studies and the rich history of writing on and through translation in Latin America, I analyze an attempt to clone Carlos Fuentes gone awry in the first text and the Oedipal and hermeneutic violence that characterizes the second to argue that, by means of their explicit engagement of the translational trope of textual reproduction, these contemporary writers challenge centrist models of cultural geopolitics and posit ludic, nonhierarchical models of reciprocal influence in their stead.

Framing Women: Frame, Perspective and Interpretation in Fortunata y Jacinta, Grand Bal, and Madeleine

Abstract: Despite the nineteenth century�s quest to know and represent the world �just as it truly is,�� many philosophers, writers, and artists questioned whether such an enterprise was even possible. For them, human knowledge is imperfect: we only �know�� the world and our fellow human beings through interpretation. Numerous contemporaneous Spanish artists seem to have shared a particular interest in how women of different social classes are ��framed�� by and ��understood�� through social expectations and codes. This article probes how setting, clothing, and cultural background shape the ways in which the protagonist of Benito Perez Galdos�s 1886�1887 novel Fortunata y Jacinta is seen by the people in her life, as well as how the Catalan modernista artists Santiago Rusinol and Ramon Casas explore, in their respective paintings Grand Bal (1891) and Madeleine (1892), the ways in which women from the ��popular�� classes are framed by attire, social spaces, and iconography.

“La fotografía es la misma muerte”: Ruina, espectro y testimonio de Antonio Machado en Guerra en España de Juan Ramón Jiménez

Abstract: Juan Ramon Jimenez’s unfinished project Guerra en Espana can be read as a literary testimony of his exile in the USA and Latin America. Between 1936 and 1954, Jimenez created a heterogeneous archive of his own and others’ materials so as to document his activities in favor of the Republic during the Spanish Civil War and his time in exile. Following Jimenez’s visionary poetics, his project can be articulated as a montage of epitaphic ruins that bears witness to the near-death experience of Antonio Machado and Jimenez, while safeguarding their works from political use. The tensions between politics and poetics revealed by this montage clarify the important place that recent studies give to Jimenez in 20th-century Spanish intellectual history. resumen: El proyecto inacabado de Juan Ramon Jimenez Guerra en Espana puede leerse como un testimonio literario del destierro del escritor en Estados Unidos y Latinoamerica. Entre 1936 y 1954, Jimenez creo un archivo de materiales miscelaneos propios y ajenos para documentar sus actividades en pro de la Republica durante la Guerra Civil espanola y el exilio. Conforme a su poetica visionaria, el proyecto se articula como un montaje de ruinas epitaficas que atestiguan la experiencia de acercamiento a la muerte de Antonio Machado y de Jimenez, salvaguardando sus obras de usos politicos. Las tensiones entre politica y poetica que revela este montaje aclaran la importante posicion que estudios recientes otorgan a Jimenez en la historia intelectual de la Espana del siglo XX.

On the Easel of Independence

Abstract: This article examines “courtroom paintings” in Latin American art, focusing on the works of Martin Tovar y Tovar, Juan Lovera, and especially Pedro Subercaseaux. Drawing from the philosophical work of Alain Badiou, the article offers a comparative reading of the theme of “anticipation” in several of their paintings, suggesting that this theme may point to an underlying democratic element in art about independence. The article ends by discussing Subercaseaux’s work in the context of the Argentine centenary celebration of independence, exploring the ways in which its use of “anticipation,” counterintuitively, might have made it easier for the regime to co-opt in its attempt to rewrite the moment of independence in 1910.

Asia en la España del siglo XIX: literatos, viajeros, intelectuales y diplomáticos ante Oriente by Joan Torres-Pou

Abstract: Torres-Pou, joan. Asia en la Espana del siglo XIX: literatos, viajeros, intelectuales y diplomaticos ante Oriente. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2013. 218 pp.In this monograph Dr. Joan Torres-Pou analyzes the unique orientalist discourse that appears in the different genres of writing by nineteenth-century Spanish authors who focus on Asia, predominantly the Far East (Philippines, China, Japan, etc.). In the book's introduction, Torres-Pou begins by giving a historical overview of nineteenth-century Western interest and colonization in the East. Then he proposes a question that will guide his analysis for the rest of the book: What was Spain's role in this European expansion into Asia? He partially answers this question by stating that, though Spain was not as materially invested as other European countries in the East, there was definitely a presence and interest in Asia at this time. In fact, he states that the main objective of his study is to convince readers of the need to look not just at the orientalism in Spain's literature but also at the presence of Asia in nineteenth-century Spanish society. Without the reevaluation and study of the texts generated by this presence and interest, he claims, it will never be possible to completely comprehend the complexity of Spanish history and literature during an era that was so decisive for the Spanish nation (21). And he manages, in the rest of the book, to masterfully accomplish this goal.The first chapter of the book deals with Juan Valera's writing on the Orient, in particular his novel Morsamor (1899). Based on in-depth research and knowledge of Valera's interest in Asian religions and history, Torres-Pou is able to demonstrate that Morsamor contains an orientalist subtext, in the sense given to it by literary critic Edward Said, hidden behind the sensational and parodie plot of the novel. Torres-Pou shows convincingly that the subtext, based on Valera's Eurocentric attitude common to that time, works to highlight the superiority of the Arian race. However, he also indicates that, due to the large amount of dialogue in the text, the reader is left to decipher the meaning of the passages, and therefore, this same racist and orientalist message is constantly put into question.A similar tactic and phenomenon is highlighted in chapter two, which deals with Luis Valera, Juan Valera's son, and his writing on his experiences as a diplomat in China. In Luis Valera's interesting text, Sombras chinescas (1902), dealing with a time in China just after the Boxer rebellions, Torres-Pou shows that, although Valera takes a stance of civilized superiority vis-a-vis the Orient, similar to that of his father, it is also evident in his writing that he questions the "progress" of a civilization that imposes itself on others in such a violent fashion. Torres-Pou points out that Luis Valera's texts contain similar sentiments of superiority and a desire to highlight the Arian origin of Western civilization, as his father did, but that because of the skeptical and sarcastic manner in which much of his writing is carried out, again, the orientalist messages become less straightforward and more questionable.The third chapter is a study of the cronicas of two principal participants in Spain's nineteenth-century "Campana de Cochinchina" (a Vietnamese military campaign): Father Francisco Gainza Escobas and Colonel Carlos Palanca Gutierrez. By analyzing the texts of these two figures as not just historical documents but also literary documents, Torres-Pou is able to demonstrate that once again there is a hidden message behind these apparent stories of military conquest. That message calls into question other European powers' colonial ambitions and at the same time Spain's political situation and its own colonial prowess, which is ambiguous at best. In doing so, the contradictions and ambiguities of Spain's colonial discourse are again revealed.Along similar lines, in chapter four of the monograph, Torres-Pou analyzes writings on the Philippines by the Spanish diplomat in China during the midnineteenth century, Sinibaldo de Mas y Sanz, and the Spanish General Director of Administration of the Philippines, Vicente Barrantes Moreno. …

El Barroco, marco de agua de la narrativa hispanoamericana by Santiago Cevallos

Abstract: Cevallos’s book examines a less common variety of Baroque, the Baroque as a hidden or ‘‘latent’’ aesthetic (Barroco latente) in twentieth-century Latin American literature. Cevallos’s distinction between two opposite types of Baroques, ‘‘manifest’’ and ‘‘latent,’’ joins a long-standing thread of debate in Baroque studies that traces Baroque expression outside the inner circle of the stylistics of Baroque extravagance and excess. An older study that comes to mind for making a parallel distinction in European seventeenth-century literature is Frank Warnke’s Versions of Baroque, which differentiates between an ‘‘ornate, exclamatory, emotional’’ trend in works of the High Baroque, typified by Crashaw, Gryphius, Marino, or Góngora, and a ‘‘spare, witty, intellectual’’ trend exemplified by Donne, Marvell, or Quevedo, whose Baroque traits are more conceptual and restrained than expressive (12). Cevallos finds the ‘‘latent’’ Baroque in three early-twentieth-century Latin American writers: the Ecuadorian Pablo Palacio, the Uruguayan Juan Carlos Onetti, and the Argentine Jorge Luis Borges. The study concludes with a fourth chapter on Cuban writer José Lezama Lima’s essays and fiction as an example of the ‘‘manifest’’ Baroque, or more precisely, barroco como manifestación. Cevallos frames his investigation of the ‘‘latent Baroque’’ in twentieth-century Latin American literature as an extension of Julio Ortega’s claim that the Baroque has been the latent aesthetic of Hispanic American literature from its inception to the present, as well as Emir Rodrı́guez Monegal’s affirmation that the Baroque constitutes the latter’s watermark (marco de agua). Unlike the ‘‘manifest’’ Baroque, the ‘‘latent’’ Baroque is visible only indirectly, like a watermark against the light. Indeed, Cevallos intends his paired categories of latent vs. manifest Baroque to replace ‘‘la división simple entre un Barroco y un Neobarroco hispanoamericanos’’ (11) as more precise terms able to capture internal differences within the historical Hispanic American literary Baroque as well as the Neobaroque. He elaborates: ‘‘En este sentido, propongo diferenciar entre distintas formas del mismo: a) un Barroco dominante —que se corresponde con un Barroco histórico hispanoamericano—, b) un Barroco manifiesto, c) un Barroco latente y d) un Barroco como manifestación. La presente investigación atiende a las últimas dos formas del Barroco, vale decir,