Showing papers in "Revista De Estudios Hispanicos in 2016"

Embodied Sound and Female Voice in Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz's Canon: romance 8 and El divino Narciso

Abstract: This essay examines embodied sound as locus of female agency in Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz’s reimaginings of Echo and Narcissus in romance 8 and El divino Narciso . I argue that these pieces draw upon the interstices of seeing and hearing as well as voice’s physical and pathetic effects in order to refigure women’s aurality as counterpoint to patriarchal visuality. Debates in acoustics, musica pathetica and the music of the spheres resonate in both works and lend insight into Sor Juana’s engagement with early modern sound culture. Vestiges of Athanasius Kircher’s encyclopedic musical treatises— Musurgia universalis (1650) and Phonurgia nova (1673)—are especially salient, and his influence upon sonority in Sor Juana’s poetic imagination appears greater than previously thought. Broadly, I draw out themes of musical and non-musical sound that previous readings marginalized in order to generate further conversation about aurality in Sor Juana’s canon.

"La lente indiscreta": Visuality and Mediality in Modernista Literary Expression

Abstract: From Jose Marti’s famous declaration “decirlo es verlo” to Ruben Dario’s popular cronica series “Films de Paris,” modernista texts were imbued with a sense of the visual from the movement’s beginnings. In this essay, I argue that the interaction with emerging photographic and cinematographic technologies of the period was not a reactionary response to an existential threat of the literary by the visual. Instead, writers incorporated elements of visual culture to negotiate the field of cultural production and “to give color and life and air and flexibility to the old poetics that suffered paralysis,” to use Dario’s words that helped to define modernismo (qtd. in Franco 119). Reading lesser-known texts from writers Enrique Gomez Carrillo, Amado Nervo, and Alfonsina Storni, I propose that the discursive interaction between visual media and modernista literature furthered the literary ambitions of the cultural movement and coincided with its aesthetic purposes. Concepts from comparative media studies assist in reading the narratives of visuality during modernismo and this investigation attempts to bring this framework of study to modernista criticism in light of these writers’ immersion in the mediascape of the period. Photography and film established new routes of expression and narrative innovation in the cultural dynamic of the region. These elements also led to new critiques of Spanish American modernity through modernista textualities that increasingly incorporated visual media into the movement’s literary discourse.

Networked Literature: The Crónica Modernista and Nineteenth-Century Media Change

Abstract: This article considers the cronica modernista to offer a case study of what comparative media studies might contribute to the study of Latin American literary and cultural history. Through an analysis centered on the Havana-based literary weekly La Habana elegante, I argue that although cronistas clearly promoted the exclusivity of their writing in ways that anticipated twentieth-century notions of literary value, they also envisioned ideas of literature that disappeared after the genre’s heyday in the 1880s and 1890s. Within La Habana elegante, one of those ideas took the form of what I am calling networked literature, through which some cronistas sought to make literature a vehicle for mobilizing social and political change. The periodical’s cronicas envisioned the region’s culture as a global leader in modeling that kind of literature for an expanding world of print. Recovering La Habana elegante’s alternative notion of literature extends observations within existing scholarship on the genre about its role in promoting emerging notions of pan-Latin American identity. It also sheds new light on one of the period’s leading cronistas, Julian del Casal, who offered his own alternative to La Habana elegante’s literature.

La (des)mitificación de Tijuana en Al otro lado de Heriberto Yépez

Abstract: This study examines the representation of the city of Tijuana in the novel Al otro lado by Mexican writer Heriberto Yepez. My discussion centers on how this literary work confronts and interrogates the two most popular myths about this city’s sociocultural make-up: Tijuana as violent and perverted, a capital of sin; and Tijuana as the height of globalized cultural hybridity. The second of these myths, which stems from the city’s location and rapid changing demographics, has led critics to ascribe to Tijuana the dissolution of long-standing notions of class, nation, and identity. Yepez’s novel allows us to understand that such ideas do and do not define Tijuana. The image of this city portrayed in Al otro lado is that of a complex place that both establishes ties with and departs from hegemonic descriptive modalities therein recovering and exposing a diverse, unstable, and conflictive reality.

Francis Alÿs: Maps of the Present

Abstract: This article places the work of Mexico City-based artist Francis Alys in dialogue with contemporary technologies of spatial production. Concretely, I propose that through his engagement with the ways space is produced and delineated today, Alys’s works comprise cognitive maps of the present, in Fredric Jameson’s sense of this term: aids for understanding our place in the world of economic production. I argue this point by examining Alys’s deployment of two visual tropes: ephemerality and participation. Both are central to his aesthetics, and they are also central to the operations of the high-tech mapping technologies that exemplify the production of space today. This understanding of Alys’s work thus comprises a cartographic reading in two senses of the term. On the one hand, I read him in dialogue with the actual technologies of mapping that condition our spatial situation today, and on the other, I posit that the resultant reading helps us understand the relationship between digital and analogue technologies in a way that cognitively maps our situation in the contemporary world.

Listening to Peruvian Sound Poetry

Abstract: Poetry has long been connected to popular oral cultural traditions in Peru. This article examines some recent examples of how these oral traditions have been transformed in contemporary mediatized performances in which sound is central. Bringing sound to the forefront confronts some of our cultural assumptions about how poetry operates and opens up possibilities for understanding the genre in new ways, provoking creative responses to the poem as a literary event. Sound poetry’s challenges create other kinds of listeners, new ways of arresting our attention, urging us, perhaps, to release cognitive control. Sound most often does not function as an echo or reinforcement of meaning (as it may often be understood in a conventional reading of poetry), but rather, is another way of creating significance. The prominence of sound makes us listen differently. Poetic listening may allow us to perceive how sound is produced, recorded, and heard in certain historical moments and contexts; who speaks and how; ways in which voices may reinforce authorship or distance us from this: and lead us to think more precisely about the social and emotive powers of sound.

Jet Lag: Late Cinema in South America

Abstract: In recent years, the death of cinema has become an anxious critical and popular commonplace. This article examines this problem through a series of contemporary South American films and film projects by critically-acclaimed directors Esteban Sapir and Federico Leon (Argentina), Federico Veiroj (Uruguay), and Eduardo Coutinho (Brazil), all of which contend with cinema’s status as a late or eclipsed medium. While aesthetically divergent, their films share a desire to stage cinema’s lateness through two key tropes: architecture and modes of transport. Through mise-en-scene, framing, and montage, as well as through attentiveness to cinema’s shifting processes of circulation and reception, they construct a hauntology of the medium’s promises, in particular the mid-century modernist utopia of a democratic cinephilia as a privileged mode of spatial-temporal travel. Ultimately, I suggest the ways in which contemporary South American film offers us a unique position from which to explore the global debates on cinema’s ostensible demise as both medium and institution.

"Ese pequeño arte que tanto amamos": Remediating Cinema in El Universal Ilustrado

Abstract: The Mexico City magazine El Universal Ilustrado (1917-34) is best known today for its promotion of the avant-garde estridentista movement and the rival Contemporaneos group; however, the publication’s engagement with cinema, unparalleled in the Mexican press, has gone largely unexamined. This essay contends that El Universal Ilustrado ’s remediation of cinema through literary, journalistic, and visual discourses negotiated between postrevolutionary cultural nationalism and US mass culture, and thus between the intellectual ambitions of lettered elites and emerging popular audiences. Cinema’s social effects in the period highlighted a perceived divide between cultural producers and consumers, given Mexico’s status as an importer rather than a producer of moving-image entertainment. At the same time, the publication staged procedures for assimilating the medium of film (as a technology, an industry, and a set of subjective experiences) by linking cinema to new forms of urban circulation and erotically charged social encounters, highlighting Mexicans’ role as cultural producers in the imagined space of Los Angeles, and articulating and enforcing ideals for domestic film production and consumption. El Universal Ilustrado ’s visual and verbal heterogeneity allowed it to negotiate the conflicting cultural meanings attached to cinema, even as discourses on the medium reinscribed hierarchies of nation, race, gender, and class.

Realismo sonoro y fidelidad literaria: Las obras de cinta de Eduardo Costa

Abstract: This article proposes that the Argentine-born artist Eduardo Costa’s critical and poetical sound works from the late 1960s through the 1980s experiment with magnetic tape and stereo sound to expand the material meanings of poetry off the page. The works join alternative strands of Peircean indeixcality: the physical and even chemical indexicality familiar to photographic theory and the social, non-referential indexicality theorized in linguistic anthropology. Costa points to a materialist and linguistic media theory in works that reflect on the medium of the tape recorder even as they take on institutional violence and eulogize the diasporic art and life of Ana Mendieta.

Historia y taumaturgia intelectual. La prodigiosa invención de América en Última Tule de Alfonso Reyes

Abstract: Alfonso Reyes’s Ultima Tule exhibits a mix of history, philosophy of history, blatant self-referential discourse, literature, and ideological proclamation that becomes disquieting, owing to the frequent feeling of unrest produced by everything hybrid; that is, by any product, entity, or process that defies established taxonomies. This fact is neither rare nor unconscious in Reyes’s oeuvre, especially with regard to his essays, that “centaur of genres” so dominant in his work. Curiously, his propensity to hybridity always goes hand-in-hand with a parallel and apparently contradictory aspiration to an Apollonian coherence. Ultima Tule provides a key to the understanding of this antinomy in Reyes. The monstrosity concerning genre that characterizes this particular text acquires a sense of unity through the combined strength of three axes of cohesion. First, Ultima Tule develops a pervasive idea according to which history, either in the sense of a chronicle of the past or of the very past itself, is always seen as a sort of verbal construction ruled by a poetics close to those used in literature, but without eschewing on that account an unwavering claim to truth. Second, it argues for a complementary conception of Latin America qua heterogeneous discursive field. Finally, and as a seemingly ineluctable consequence of those first two points, Ultima Tule defends a vision of the Latin American intellectual as taking the leading role in the task of deciphering, interpreting, and shaping the continent’s historical developments.

Fuego en Castilla (1957-60): El cine espectral de José Val del Omar

Abstract: Fuego en Castilla (1957-60) by Jose Val del Omar experiments with iconic images of Spanish imperial culture. I argue that the Spanish Baroque imagery in this short documentary film serves as a spectral remainder of two of the most important official discourses of the time: the imperial Catholic discourse of Franco’s regime and the emerging modernizing discourse of capitalism. This argument enters into dialogue with Jacques Derrida’s concept of spectrality and Gilles Deleuze’s notion of movement-image. I position Val del Omar’s film in contrast with the regime’s official ideology regarding cinema in general, and documentary film in particular.

It Came from California: The AIDS Origin Story in Spain

Abstract: In 1981, a medical report was published that described the death of a Spanish man with symptoms of Kaposi’s sarcoma, an illness that was increasingly linked to AIDS. Two years later, other reports detailed the illnesses and deaths of two young hemophiliac brothers in Spain who died only months after receiving blood transfusions. This article analyzes the mediated response to these cases, along with the construction of an origins narrative around the outbreak of AIDS in Spain. The origins story created in this moment in Spain would determine not only the public reaction to the illness, but the legal and governmental response, in turn provoking a true crisis of modernity within Spain. By analyzing these first cases and their subsequent media coverage, this article examines the images and words that constructed a unilateral history of the origins of HIV/AIDS in Spain.

El sonsoneto y la práctica poética cortesana del siglo XVI

Abstract: In the Spanish courts of the Renaissance we find traditional poetic forms such as coplas, romances, villancicos , etc. alongside the Petrarchan sonnet. We also find compositions that resemble the Italian stanza, albeit with a more social, lighthearted, and courtly spirit that we more commonly associate with the Cancionero Poetry. “ Sonsonetos ” –as these sonnet-like poems are called– are ludic and ephemeral compositions that seek to initiate aulic conversations and serve as a pastime for a refined court society. Thanks to the prestige of the newly introduced Italian stanza –from which the “ sonsoneto ” departs– and aided by its playful nature, the “ sonsoneto ” quickly found a way into the spaces and times of leisure that had previously been filled by motes, coplas, romances , and other traditional forms of entertainment. The study of these short-lived compositions and their reception by the aulic society opens up new ways to explore the assimilation and coexistence of the Italian meters and the Spanish poetic tradition during the Renaissance. Additionally, by focusing on the Valencian court of the Duke of Calabria, we get a privileged insight into how poetry was produced and consumed by the court society of the time.

La traducción literaria como máscara: aproximaciones a las Poesías Líricas de Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda

Abstract: In the context of the modernization of the Cuban and Spanish cultural fields, around the middle of the nineteenth century, romanticism offered Cuban and Spanish women writers an opportunity to express themselves as subjects. However, confronted with the reluctance of the literary and cultural institutions to include them, they proceeded to develop various strategies to legitimize their literary work. Through the inclusion in her poetry of more or less free translations of various canonical romantic poets, Gertrudis Gomez de Avellaneda uses translation as a mask with which she can access discursive spaces related to the public sphere, legitimize women’s poetic activity, inscribe herself in a recognizable tradition, appropriate the literary fame of the translated authors, and display her virtuosity. In this way, she endowed her own poetry with authority. Through the modifications she makes to the translated poems and under the aegis of these canonical poets she is thus able to establish a feminine lyric subject and advocate for the inclusion of women in all aspects of the literary field.

Lullaby Poetics; Working-Through the Maternal Hold in Puerto Rico (1937)

Abstract: In this essay, I describe a “lullaby poetics” practiced by two poets from Puerto Rico who wrote at the beginning of the twentieth century: Clara Lair and Carmen Alicia Cadilla Ruibal. This poetics goes beyond the literary subgenre of the lullaby, inaugurated and practiced by the poet Gabriela Mistral ten years before Lair and Cadilla Ruibal began to write. As developed by the writers from Puerto Rico, the lullaby poetics contains and preserves a complex symbolic experience that the colonial discourse about maternity tries to erase. This is an experience that is at the foundation and at the heart of every society. Here, I claim that to understand the lullaby poetics inaugurated by these two poets the reader must revisit and revise the current approaches to literature, history and sociology as practiced by contemporary feminist, post-feminist, and post-colonial discourses.

Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, la esfera pública y el abolicionismo: representaciones del sujeto esclavizado y la esclavitud caribeña en Sab

Abstract: This article examines the positioning of Gertrudis Gomez de Avellaneda and her first novel, Sab , in the early nineteenth-century literary public sphere. It studies the writer’s strategies to establish her work in a predominantly masculine literary field, as well as participate in one of the key debates of the period: slavery and abolition. At the same time, this essay analyzes the representation of enslaved subjects by offering a comparative reading of Sab and The History of Mary Prince , the narrative of an enslaved woman from the British Caribbean. This analysis aims to generate dialogue with recent critical readings that highlight Sab’s ambiguous position toward slavery, as well as problematize the (in)visibility of slave women in both texts.

The Reluctant Troubadour: Tracing the Oral Tradition in the Poetics of Juan Gelman

Abstract: ����� ��� Juan Gelman’s declared affinities with the Spanish mystic poets or with Sephardic texts, along with the titles of collections such as Traducciones, Notas, and Citas y comentarios , underscore the significant presence of the written tradition in his poetics. In this essay, however, I argue for the importance of the oral tradition in arriving at a fuller understanding of Gelman’s work. Many of Gelman’s poems have their roots in ancient expressive modes that connect poetry to song, lamentation, incantation or curse, modes that often operate in ways distinct from those of the written word. This line of inquiry leads us to reflect on oral poetry as a verbal act more commonly associated with a public voice than with a private one, given that orality implies by definition a communal exchange. In this paper I examine two particular manifestations of the oral tradition, the charm and the lament, in order to explore the complex relationships between orality and writing, and by extension, between the intimate and the communal voice in Gelman’s work.

Topografía y alegoresis en El primer loco, de Rosalía de Castro

Abstract: This article deals with the last of the novels written by Rosalia de Castro, El primer loco [The first inmate] (1881). From the perspective of a critical literary geography, it proposes an analysis of the referential logic that organizes this significant novel, which is very close in its conception and publication to En las orillas del Sar [On the banks of the river Sar], the last of the author’s great collections of poetry. The article specifically tackles the web of meanings underlying the choice of the key settings of the novel, Santiago de Compostela and the neighboring monastery of Conxo, both of which underwent processes of change related to deep ideological, social, but also spatial transformations that were current at the moment of the novel’s writing. These locations are conceived as products of discursive practices—produced places—allowing us to attend to them in terms of intertextual convergences and tensions among seemingly distant media like fiction, guidebooks, art history or painting and photography. Against this background, this article suggests a new interpretation of this often neglected work, which should be revised in the context of the Galician and Hispanic literature of the last quarter of the nineteenth century.

Nómadas, desempleados y suicidas: racionalidad neoliberal y subjetividades alternas en la literatura centroamericana de posguerra

Abstract: In this article, I argue that Central American postwar literature—rather than expressing cynicism, affliction or disenchantment as some critics have argued— reveals, questions, and resists the shift in the locus of sovereign power from the political to the economic sphere, which is the result of the consolidation of neoliberalism as the governing rationality and the ensuing economization of all domains of life. Given this context, I claim that the parameters of inclusion and exclusion no longer stem from ideological or political affinities, as was the case during the revolutionary decades, but depend instead on the ability and willingness of the subject to (1) compete and participate in the free market as producer, worker, and/or consumer; and (2) internalize the alleged moral and ethical precepts by means of which neoliberal rationality constructs both the subject and life in common. I therefore argue that the prominent presence in this literary production of subjectivities such as the nomad, the unemployed and the suicide—subjectivities that in one way or another manage to escape neoliberal logic and morality—is not only symptomatic of this change in the locus of sovereignty and the construction of the subject, but also politically critical of it. What is at stake in this literary production is no longer the re-signification of the past, but rather the articulation of the present itself and a different future in which the subject is no longer conceived of and constructed as a mere homo oeconomicus .

La figura del vago en la España ilustrada

Abstract: The eighteenth century witnessed a renewed interest in debating the classification of the poor. What principles did the Enlightenment employ to distinguish the poor from the vagrant? The present study focuses on the debate that throughout the eighteenth century elaborated on the dichotomy between the deserving poor and the idle vagrant, paying particular attention to how the intellectual elite, the Crown, and the populace negotiated the contours of the vagrant. Economic and normative discourses as well as judicial practices regarding the policing of vagrancy are subject to examination. The monarchy primarily focused on its economic goals promulgating royal decrees, which punished unproductivity, but the identification of the idle vagrant was problematic. Tensions between the law and its application, between individuals and civil servants, and the resistance of the so-called vagrant to such classification highlight the ambiguity of the concept. This essay studies the archive where the uneven power between administrators and common people negotiated the idea of vagrancy and its corresponding discipline. Claims in court delineated the limits of royal power but, ultimately, difficulties agreeing on the meaning of vagrancy increased the number of men over whom the Crown exercised its right to impose forced labor.

Escenografías autoriales en la escritura epistolar de Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, 1839-1840

Abstract: This article focuses on Gertrudis Gomez de Avellaneda’s epistolary writing. The corpus is comprised of a series of letters, including the author’s Autobiografia , which were composed in Seville between 1839 and 1840, and later in Madrid between 1840 and 1854. In this article, I focus primarily on the earlier texts. All are addressed to Ignacio de Cepeda, a man with whom the author maintained a romantic friendship during different points of her life. In my reading, I identify the configuration of a Romantic feminine subjectivity that is torn between the active and desiring impulses associated with Romanticism, and the marginalizing socio-symbolic mandates that defined women as the “angel of the house” and curtailed her autonomy. I show how this subjectivity emerges from her affirmation of authorship and provides a channel for her voice. The author makes use of a genre that inevitably decenters the absolute masculine subject and installs an I/you dialogic relationship implicit in the genre’s structure. Moreover, the private letter’s intimate and emotional character allows the speaker to perform authorship for the masculine-other addressee without breaking the rules of acceptable behavior for upper class Spanish women.

New Trends in Contemporary Latin American Narrative: Post-National Literatures and the Canon ed. by Timothy R. Robbins and José Eduardo González (review)

Abstract: la cultura, rescatando una sensibilidad que antes quedaba relativamente marginada” (265). Pérez lee a Sobre héroes y tumbas como un ejemplo paradigmático de cómo la inteligencia liberal representada por autores como Sábato polemiza con el nacionalismo antiliberal de autores como Scalabrini Ortiz (capítulo diez). Los capítulos once y doce representan la elección de autores como Lamboghini y Puig de lo que Pérez denomina “el orden sentimental” de la estética del peronismo, mientras que el capítulo trece analiza la obra de Leopoldo Marechal (en particular Megafón o la guerra) como una representación del compromiso espiritual y material del peronismo con lo popular. Los últimos cinco capítulos de Literatura, periodismo y liberación nacional son un verdadero hallazgo crítico. En “El avión negro: Perón vuelve” y “La hora de los hornos: cine y liberación”, Alberto Julián Pérez lleva a cabo un excelente estudio de los colectivos de autores Roberto Cossa, Germán Rozenmacher, Carlos Somigliana y Ricardo Talesnik (que estrenaron la obra colectiva polémica El avión negro en 1970), y del grupo Cine liberación (Solanas, Getino y Gerardo Vallejo). En esta última parte, Pérez se aproxima al estudio de la postvanguardia y el arte experimental de los años sesenta y setenta como una reactualización de la retórica populista del Peronismo en términos estéticamente adecuados a las rupturas formales del período. En este contexto se ubican las lecturas de la poesía de Gelman (capítulo quince) y la obra narrativa de Piglia (capítulo dieciséis). Como texto panorámico de las contribuciones a la historia cultural argentina del peronismo, Literatura, periodismo y liberación nacional constituye un interesante estudio crítico a lo mucho que se ha publicado y escrito sobre el tema.

Políticas de la destrucción / Poéticas de la preservación: Apuntes para una lectura (eco)crítica del medio ambiente en América Latina by Gisela Heffes (review)

Abstract: notion of cultural mixing, or mestizaje. What García-Caro does not acknowledge is that the element he criticizes also contradicts his reading of Fuentes as an enemy of identity thinking. Furthermore, the reader of After the Nation who is not already familiar with Fuentes’s work and career won’t learn from this book that Fuentes served as his country’s ambassador to France in the 1970s, nor that for many decades he was a highly visible spokesman for his country and his continent in the United States and elsewhere. When he defended the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua in the 1980s, Fuentes did so in the name of the right to national self-determination, an ideal he defended throughout his career. Nor is there is any reference in this book to Fuentes’s decades-long preoccupation with the Mexican Revolution, an event he frequently mythologized as an explosive moment of national self-discovery. In sum, a more nuanced and complex view of the Mexican author would acknowledge that he sometimes subverted the nation, and sometimes supported it. The idea that Fuentes had an ambivalent relationship with Mexico has, of course, been explored in previous criticism, but this is overlooked by García-Caro. A final reservation has to do with the disciplinary framework within which the author places his book. García-Caro claims that After the Nation is intended as a contribution to the field of Hemispheric American studies. But for the notion of “the hemisphere” to be meaningful, one needs an explanation as to how the hemispheric context shapes the works under consideration in a way that is different from, say, national, regional, or civilizational contexts. And this is something García-Caro does not offer. Nor for that matter does he probe very deeply into the comparative questions that might be raised by looking at Fuentes and Pynchon together. The author might have asked, for example, whether there isn’t a huge difference between being against the nation in Mexico and in the United States. In an essay titled “Nacionalismo, integración y cultura” included in Nuevo tiempo mexicano (1994), Fuentes pointed out that Mexican nationalism has been defined at least in part by its vicinity to the aggressive nationalism of the United States. In short, Fuentes was suggesting that not all nationalisms were created equal, and that in Mexico a defensive nationalism was a simple matter of survival. For the book under review to be successful, it would have had to take this aspect of Fuentes’s thinking into account.

Merengue, vudú y nación: el panteón rayano de Marcio Veloz Maggiolo

Abstract: This article analyses the role of merengue and voodoo in El hombre del acordeon (2003) by Marcio Veloz Maggiolo. I argue that the representation of music and religion serves to problematize traditional accounts of Dominican culture. Special attention is paid to the patriarchal and authoritative components of official Dominican culture in the Trujillo era (1930-61), particularly the massacre of Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian origin near the border between the two countries in 1937. Another critical aspect examined in this article is the rayano subject (the inhabitant of the border or “raya”) as representative of the cultural intermingling between Haiti and the Dominican Republic, which is studied through the notions of “paradigm” (Agamben) and “quasi-object” (Latour). The rayano is fundamental for the diegesis as it is deeply connected to the critical spheres of merengue and voodoo in El hombre del acordeon . The article concludes with a careful examination of those elements in the narrative that seem to contradict the subversive intent of Veloz Maggiolo’s novelistic project through the repetition of patterns of patriarchal authoritarianism.