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Showing papers in "Hispanic Review in 2016"


Journal ArticleDOI
Abstract: This article contends that bloodlines stand as one of the most fundamental yet overlooked aspects of Leopoldo Alas’s seminal work La Regenta. In fact, the narrative begins and ends with the tarnished lineage of Ana Ozores who, over the course of the narrative, wrestles with the conflicting status of her stained origin on the one hand, and her chaste, virtuous temperament on the other. Recovering the discourse of blood, I argue, proves crucial to understanding this conflict. In so doing, this article challenges the conventional periodization that equates blood with the early modern period and sexuality with the modern. Through a critical engagement with Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality, this article posits blood as the starting point for what I call the “chastity bind,” whereby the ideological underpinnings of limpieza de sangre (purity of blood) thwarts the modern sexual economy that privileges chastity over origin.

7 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: A principios del siglo XVI, Jorge de Bustamante adapto al castellano Metamorfosis de Ovidio, una traduccion que se acabaria convirtiendo in la version espanola mas difundida de la obra and en una de las fuentes de Lope de Vega as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: A principios del siglo XVI, Jorge de Bustamante adapto al castellano las Metamorfosis de Ovidio, una traduccion que se acabaria convirtiendo en la version espanola mas difundida de la obra y en una de las fuentes de Lope de Vega. Solo una de sus multiples ediciones, la que se imprimio en Amberes en 1595, aparecio con una serie de grabados del artista aleman Virgil Solis que representaban los principales episodios de los mitos ovidianos. Este articulo pretende demostrar la influencia de estas ilustraciones de Solis en la composicion de las comedias mitologicas de Lope de Vega, para revelar asi la amplia vision pictorica del dramaturgo y su capacidad para crear nuevos recursos escenicos a partir de elementos iconograficos.

6 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, the expelled morisco Ricote in Don Quijote (1615) is on a quest to reunite his family and recover a cache of buried treasure, including a substantial volume of coins.
Abstract: The expelled morisco Ricote in Don Quijote (1615) is on a quest to reunite his family and recover a cache of buried treasure, including a substantial volume of coins. This paper diverges from current critical trends focused on economic discourse in Cervantes by approaching Ricote’s coins not as economic signifiers but as material artifacts. Contrasting the numismatic messages materially embodied in Ricote’s coins with his own personal drama, a fundamental dissonance emerges, problematizing Cervantes’s representation of the morisco expulsion, and opening Ricote’s story to a broader interrogation of the relationship between numismatic propaganda and contemporary justifications of the mass expulsions of 1609–1614 (such as those penned by apologists like Aznar Cardona, Bleda, Corral y Rojas, Fonseca, and Guadalajara y Javier).

6 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In the sonnets “Al pincel” and “A la pintura,” from his 1945 homonymous book of poems, Rafael Alberti takes as his starting point the Baroque idea of pictorial art as expressed in Francisco de Quevedo's silva “El pincels” (ca. 1625) and reelabora sobre its conceptos centrales: the caracter heroico de the pintura and the idea of its ilimitada capacidad de representacion.
Abstract: espanolEn los sonetos “Al pincel” y “A la pintura”, recogidos en su poemario homonimo de 1945, Rafael Alberti parte de la idea barroca del arte pictorico expresada ejemplarmente en la silva “El pincel” de Francisco de Quevedo (c. 1625) y reelabora sobre sus conceptos centrales: por un lado, el caracter heroico de la pintura y, por otro, la idea de su ilimitada capacidad de representacion. Alberti pone este material al servicio de su poetica del arte pictorico, en la que las constantes del tiempo y de la muerte quedan fuera del texto. El resultado es una nueva poesia que identifica la pintura con creacion que supera la mimesis clasica, dejando campo libre a la imaginacion del artista, asi como con vida, mediante la utilizacion de un lenguaje poetico altamente plastico que, en si mismo, constituye un rechazo al estancamiento percibido por el poeta en el ambiente cultural de la Espana de posguerra. EnglishIn the sonnets “Al pincel” and “A la pintura,” from his 1945 homonymous book of poems, Rafael Alberti takes as his starting point the Baroque idea of pictorial art as expressed in Francisco de Quevedo’s silva “El pincel” (ca. 1625). He does this by elaborating on its two central concepts: on the one hand, the heroic nature of painting, and on the other, its unlimited capacity for representation. Alberti puts this material at the service of his own poetics, in which the constants of time and death remain outside the text. The result is a new poetry that identifies painting with creation, which can overcome mimesis by giving free rein to the artist’s imagination. Likewise, painting is also associated with life, by means of a highly plastic poetic language, which in itself constitutes a rejection of the stagnation perceived by the poet in the cultural atmosphere of post-Civil War Spain.

6 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The La Flor de la Playa novella as mentioned in this paper explores themes of consumption and social mobility in early-twentieth-century Portugal and Spain, focusing on a seamstress who travels with her office-worker boyfriend from Madrid to Portugal on a summer vacation.
Abstract: Carmen de Burgos’s novella La Flor de la Playa explores themes of consumption and social mobility in early-twentieth-century Portugal and Spain. Elisa, the novella’s working-class protagonist, is a seamstress who travels with Enrique, her office-worker boyfriend, from Madrid to Portugal on a summer vacation. During their trip, the lovers pretend to be a middle-class married couple. Elisa and Enrique facilitate their social transformations within the foreign linguistic, spatial, and social contexts of Portugal through the consumption and production of fashion, language, and the touristic space of the beach. Despite their belief in the socially transformative power of consumption, the couple is unable and, in Elisa’s case, unwilling to adopt the conventional and stifling model of middleclass marriage. Ultimately, their relationship collapses under the strain of a foreign and incompatible “grammar” of bourgeois marriage, restrictive middle-class values, and illusory social mobility.

6 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The Dominican literary journal Brigadas Dominicanas published ten issues between December 1961 and March 1963 as mentioned in this paper, which served as an important repository for testimonial literature about the Trujillato regime.
Abstract: The Dominican literary journal Brigadas Dominicanas published ten issues between December 1961 and March 1963. Its director, the Dominican poet and intellectual, Aida Cartagena Portalatin, affirmed her journal as a space open to compatriots committed to artistic and political freedom following the May 1961 assassination of the dictator Rafael Trujillo. Although its pages serve as an important repository for testimonial literature about the Trujillato, it is more than a simple anthology. While historians maintain that literary discourse played a negligible role during the postdictatorship moment, Brigadas reveals an intense social and political engagement by artists and intellectuals in the political and social life of the nation. Thus, rather than a time bereft of literary activity, Brigadas shows 1961–1965 as a period during which Dominican artists and intellectuals began what would be a long and continuing struggle to define the role of art and literature in a free society.

5 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This article examined how Latino used apostrophes directed at his patron Pedro de Deza to establish a close link between the addressee of the epic poem in Latin on the Battle of Lepanto, while at the same time encouraging deza to visualize the scenes described.
Abstract: This article explores the functions of apostrophe and other strategies of mediated reception in Juan Latino’s Austrias Carmen (1573), a two-book epic poem in Latin on the Battle of Lepanto. Latino’s epic repeatedly invites the narratee to fix his or her gaze on remarkable spectacles, creating a tension between narrative and discursive time. In the first part of the article, I examine how Latino uses apostrophes directed at his patron Pedro de Deza to establish a close link between the addressee of the epic—Deza—and the Habsburg dynasty, while at the same time encouraging Deza to visualize the scenes described. In the second part, I question the shift within the poem from apostrophes explicitly addressing Deza towards ones directed at an implicit narratee. Latino’s purpose, I argue, is therefore to put before the eyes of the narratee his marvelous artistic skills as a painter with words.

4 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, the authors argue that the combination of costumbrismo, a genre concerned with type characters and scenes, and realism, which focuses on the faithful representation of reality, creates a crisis of referents in the narrative that destabilizes how the text produces meaning.
Abstract: Published as a short novel in Cuba in 1839 but expanded and published definitively in the United States in 1882, Cirilo Villaverde’s Cecilia Valdes is typically read for its antislavery and pro-independence messages. However, I argue that the novel’s costumbrista description and its realist plot generate a crisis of meaning that modifies the text’s antislavery and pro-independence messages in an unexpected way: the narrative imagines a future Cuba as a liberal nation-state that, paradoxically, functions by means of a colonial racial hierarchy, thus preserving the colonial structure of society. My analysis shows that the combination of costumbrismo , a genre concerned with type characters and scenes, and realism, which focuses on the faithful representation of reality, creates a crisis of referents in the narrative that destabilizes how the text produces meaning. Indeed, this crisis generates a surplus of meanings that undermine the text’s explicit goals of political and economic liberalism.

3 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors argue that reading the first journal through Mario's editing of the manuscript exposes a mocking and experimental approach to ethnographic practices and exposes his careful attention to the creation of archives and collections as a way to create cultural memory in Brazil.
Abstract: This article repositions Mario de Andrade’s ethnographic journals of his two trips within a larger cultural context by shifting the focus from an established text to the process through which two media, the archive and the newspaper, shaped their content and differences. I argue that reading the first journal through Mario’s editing of the manuscript exposes a mocking and experimental approach to ethnographic practices. It also exposes his careful attention to the creation of archives and collections as a way to create cultural memory in Brazil. The journal of his second trip is aligned with the political and cultural agenda of the Diario Nacional and O Partido Democratico , in which ethnography is practiced in a less experimental way and aims to assert a collective voice. Diario Nacional and O Partido Democratico, in which ethnography is practiced in a less experimental way and aims to assert a collective voice. --

3 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, the authors present a catalogue of figures and bodies that move through the heterogeneous scene of monstrosity and merchandise in the Historia general y natural de las Indias (1535-1550) by Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo.
Abstract: espanolEste articulo trata sobre lo monstruoso entendido como mercancia y consumo en la Historia general y natural de las Indias (1535-1550), de Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo. El exceso de la materialidad, la exuberante naturaleza americana y la deformidad de las perlas barrocas tienen una relevancia capital para entender los profundos cambios que la llegada a America produjo en la percepcion de los primeros exploradores y cronistas. En su vasta obra fundacional, Oviedo da cuenta precisamente de la gestacion de un nuevo modo de ver la diferencia y la alteridad que cabe dentro de la categoria de lo monstruoso como un fenomeno de la represen-tacion. Al mismo tiempo, apunta ya a una sensibilidad plenamente barroca, al mostrar una ausencia de armonia y orden en su forma de narrar. A traves de la focalizacion en momentos especificos de la Historia (pina, iguana, gatico monillo, entre otros), se muestra el libro como un catalogo desbor- dado de figuras y cuerpos que transitan por el escenario heterogeneo de lo monstruoso y la mercancia. EnglishThis article is about monstrosity understood as merchandise and consumerism in the Historia general y natural de las Indias (1535–1550) by Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo. The excess of materiality, exuberant American nature, and the deformity of baroque pearls have significant relevance to understanding the profound changes in perception that the discovery of America produced in the first explorers and chroniclers. In his vast, great foundational work he offers a precise account of the gestation of a new perception, a new way to see the difference and alterity that fall within the category of monstrosity as a phenomenon of representation. At the same time, Oviedo points to a sensibility that is fully baroque, showing a lack of harmony and order in his narrative form. Through a focus on specific moments of his Historia (pina, iguana, gatico monillo, among others), it becomes a catalogue overflowing with figures and bodies that move through the heterogeneous scene of monstrosity and merchandise.

3 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: A revision documental del proceso de Abdela Alicaxet, morisco valenciano condenado a la hoguera en 1576 con cargos de apostata y pirata, is presented in this paper.
Abstract: Este articulo parte de una revision documental del proceso de Abdela Alicaxet, morisco valenciano condenado a la hoguera en 1576 con cargos de apostata y pirata. Seguidamente se analiza como anos mas tarde Lope de Vega reconstruye este caso inquisitorial en Los cautivos de Argel (1599) con el fin de exponer un acervo de prejuicios, temores y ansiedades sobre la comunidad morisca, y se examinan las estrategias textuales con que la comedia desvincula de Espana a este colectivo para atribuirle una identidad extranjera. De este modo la obra reproduce el registro vulgar de la controversia de los anos previos a la expulsion, pero a la vez interviene en ella autorizando un tipo de percepcion homogenea y participando en la construccion de una conciencia colectiva de la minoria morisca como alteridad, como extranjeria peligrosa y desechable.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The Aesthetics of the Ephemeral as discussed by the authors has been used in the study of contemporary Catalan playwrights to reflect on the production of ruins in contemporary cities, the violence and the precariousness of justice and life in war and post-war predicaments, the complexities of immigration processes in a globalized world, and the continuation or destruction of intellectual legacies in our present.
Abstract: When Sharon Feldman published In the Eye of the Storm: Theater in Contemporary Barcelona, in 2009, we thought that we had the definitive study of contemporary Catalan theater. Feldman’s study is still conclusive in many ways. Jennifer Duprey’s superb The Aesthetics of the Ephemeral, however, undertakes the complementary task of approaching some of the same prominent Catalan playwrights to reflect further on four theoretical and political questions: ‘‘the production of ruins in contemporary cities, the violence and the precariousness of justice and life in war and post-war predicaments, the complexities of immigration processes in a globalized world, and the continuation or destruction of intellectual legacies in our present’’ (2). Duprey approaches theater ‘‘as a material praxis or as a thinking topology’’ (xvii) where ideas and history can appear, albeit in an ephemeral form. Her study on Catalan plays written between 1996 and 2004 articulates two central concepts. On the one hand, she adopts the notion of ‘‘memory theaters’’ from Italian philosopher Giulio Camillo to conceive theatrical performances and texts as visual symbolizations of the present and the past. Through their textual and performative manifestations, memory theaters materialize time in space, and make visible, or at least offer a fleeting glimpse at the concealed structures of historical reality. On the other hand, Duprey adopts Christine Buci-Glucksmann’s notion of ‘‘the aesthetics of the ephemeral.’’ Rather than understanding the ephemeral as a melancholic lament of the futility of human life or the uneventfulness of history, Duprey argues that in the Catalan plays that she studies, the ephemeral is a ‘‘modality of time,’’ which ‘‘leads to renewal, transformation, and hope’’ (11). The ephemeral, in other words, is a form of political engagement with both the past and the future, with both memory and action. The political aspect of the aesthetics of the ephemeral becomes thematized as a search for the utopian content of the plays. Following Jameson, who proposes to make the totality of history appear ‘‘in what must inevitably be an ephemeral apparition or glimpse’’ (xvii), so as to detect the utopian possibilities contained in cultural artifacts and social conjunctures, Duprey’s analysis of the plays puts

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In the latter half of the nineteenth century, cuadros de costumbres of the Philippines became popular in Spain, not only among average readers, but also among literary taste-makers such as Emilia Pardo Bazan as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: During the latter half of the nineteenth century, cuadros de costumbres of the Philippines became popular in Spain, not only among average readers, but also among literary taste-makers such as Emilia Pardo Bazan. The popularity of colonial costumbrismo in this period functioned as a means of judging the Philippines and the Filipinos in their capacity to participate in a modern nation and a modern market. Close readings of stories by Jose Montero y Vidal and Wenceslao E. Retana demonstrate that costumbrismo was a tool for both the cultivation of aesthetic judgment among metropolitan and criollo audiences and the suppression of the same among Filipino readers. The differing effects of costumbrista writing on metropolitan and colonial readers in turn exacerbated exploitative regimes of culture, including markets, and thus abetted the extension of imperial power into daily life in the Archipelago during the closing decades of the Spanish Empire.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors used geographer Neil Smith's concept of the politics of scale to argue for a renewed reading of Rosario Castellanos's first novel, Balun Canan (1957), within the context of regional narrative.
Abstract: This article uses geographer Neil Smith’s concept of the politics of scale to argue for a renewed reading of Rosario Castellanos’s first novel, Balun Canan (1957), within the context of regional narrative. That reading is accomplished by combining recent contextual investigations in history and sociology with crucial allusions to economic structures in the novel. In keeping with Smith’s formulations, Balun Canan is shown to be a work in which no simple resolution can be made between global, regional, and national contexts.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The relationship between music and text in the works of Julio Cortazar has typically been studied in terms of his predilection for jazz as mentioned in this paper, with a focus on tango.
Abstract: The noteworthy relationship between music and text in the works of Julio Cortazar has typically been studied in terms of his predilection for jazz. This essay takes up a diverse assortment of references to tango in his oeuvre, paying special attention to the tangopoemas in the 1984 volume Salvo el crepusculo. Using as its starting point his description of tango’s effect in the Argentine listener as “sardonic recurrence,” the essay considers Cortazar’s varied acknowledgments of tango’s role in his creative life subsequent to his relocation to Paris. It surveys these instances as proof of the preferential place classic tango lyrics occupy in Cortazar’s memory and reference library.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors focus on the related notions of friendship and communication as they are developed in a political framework in two works, the Brevyloquyo de amor e amicicia (ca. 1437) and De optima politia (1436), by the fifteenth-century Castilian scholar Alfonso de Madrigal, el Tostado.
Abstract: This article focuses on the related notions of friendship and communication as they are developed in a political framework in two works, the Brevyloquyo de amor e amicicia (ca. 1437) and De optima politia (1436), by the fifteenth-century Castilian scholar Alfonso de Madrigal, el Tostado. Through a reflection on the possibility of friendship and communication with the divine, Madrigal puts forward a model of civil friendship based on the composite and permeable natures of both human interiority and human social structures such as the city.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Te doy mis ojos as discussed by the authors provides an important critique of such historical, patriarchal representations of women in art and literature by portraying a unique female perspective of gendered violence in all of its brutality.
Abstract: The persistent problem of violence against women in Spain has often been obscured by the representation of female pain and suffering as a form of beauty. The film Te doy mis ojos provides an important critique of such historical, patriarchal representations of women in art and literature by portraying a unique female perspective of gendered violence in all of its brutality. This article studies Te doy mis ojos from three perspectives. First, it provides a historical context of violence against women through an examination of the Spanish legal system from medieval times to the present. Second, it analyzes the film as a response to the politics [End Page 125] of the aesthetics of violence in early modern Spain. Finally, it compares the film with the unique female voice of seventeenth-century writer Maria de Zayas. These three perspectives demonstrate an idiosyncratic female dialectic of violence that is important for understanding the portrayal of domestic violence in Spain, its relation to the legal context, and how it might be that we now perceive historical misrepresentations of violence against women as something sensual and beautiful.


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Porous City as discussed by the authors explores the relationship between the Lettered city and Cidade Nova, highlighting the porosity of the city's porosity and its cultural production, including Afro-Brazilian music, prostitution, and modernist artists' fascination with the Mangue's bordellos.
Abstract: making lower-class neighborhoods the center and subject of many of his narratives. Chapter Four focuses on Afro-Jewish music in Cidade Nova, prostitution, and modernist writers’ and artists’ fascination with the Mangue’s bordellos. One of the most compelling analyses in this chapter is about modernist painters, underscoring how Lasar Segall ‘‘portrays a mostly de-eroticized human landscape, evoking a pathos that contrasts with the sensuous forms and colours of Di Cavalcanti’s Mangue’’ (128). In the first four chapters, we find go-betweens: singers, party hostesses, writers, and composers who bridged the gap between the Lettered City and Cidade Nova, revealing the porosity of the book’s title. Yet, the construction of President Vargas Avenue split apart Cidade Nova and dismantled its identity as a place of diversity, intermingling, and artistic production. Chapters Five and Six both touch on an important contradiction, which led to Cidade Nova’s dissolution: ‘‘just as the idea of a national identity founded upon mixture gained prominence and acceptance in the 1930s and early 1940s, a combination of technological, urbanistic, and political forces led to a more divided city’’ (136). The behemoth President Vargas Avenue—meant to showcase Brazil abroad and emblemize modernity—was the product of those forces. It’s All True and Samba, two unfinished films by Orson Welles—starring Afro-Brazilians and showcasing a predominantly black Cidade Nova and carnival—were met with unease by investors and collaborators both in Brazil and in Hollywood: ‘‘Afro-Brazilian culture had already become part of the repertoire through which the country represented itself to the world, but It’s All True appears to have crossed a line’’ (178). Today Cidade Nova still exists, but is a fraction of the size it once was and boasts fewer than 6,000 residents (compared to over 79,000 in 1906). However, Porous City reminds us of its important history, as it brings to life many of the traces of the neighborhood. This book will be illuminating for readers curious about the history of Rio de Janeiro and about the city’s cultural production, primarily maxixe, samba, and literature. Moreover, it will cause readers to reflect on how they position (here? there? way over there?) the urban spaces they come into contact with in their own lives.