Showing papers in "Revista De Estudios Hispanicos in 2019"

Of Monsters and Malinches: Signifying Violence in Edgar Clément's Operación Bolívar and Tony Sandoval's El cadáver y el sofá

Abstract: In this article, I show how Mexican artists Edgar Clement and Tony Sando-val work through representations of mutable, gendered bodies to explore the manifestations of neoliberalism and the kinds of violence that are encouraged or facilitated within that socioeconomic framework. More specifically, I argue that both artists make use of a wide range of monsters and monstrous characters to revelatory effect as they employ a series of specifically Mexican monsters to relate multifaceted stories of violence on a personal and systemic level. This is particularly true regarding their construction and positioning of la Malinche or malinchista characters as the monstrous/revelatory centers of each text. Lastly, I argue that the use of an open medium such as comics/graphic narrative provides both artists with an ideal platform to relate issues of drug-related violence and trauma for two reasons: first, it interrogates what Oswaldo Zavala has called the critical limits of narconarrative, as both texts refuse to present drug or other violence as disconnected from the nation and the state. Secondly, this interroga-tive power is due in part to the way in which the Mexican reading public has historically been trained to consume and interact with graphic narrative.

Plagio y anacronismo deliberado en la novela antiesclavista cubana

Abstract: Plagiarism—the crime of stealing a slave or kidnapping and enslaving a free person—was widespread in nineteenth-century Cuba, yet it has been completely neglected by literary scholars. When examined through the prism of plagiarism, Cirilo Villaverde’s Cecilia Valdes (1882) and Francisco Calcagno’s Romualdo, uno de tantos (1891) allow us to perceive the anachronism and replaceability of bodies; that is, the experience of the long chain of deferrals, denials, and displacements required to treat some lives as disposable, according to the logic of globally asymmetrical structural inequalities. Plagiarism was simultaneously the concrete act of kidnapping a human being and the manifestation of an abstract economic process that endowed that body with value as both commodity and capital. As a socially constitutive vulnerability, this crime evinced the social prac-tices—including violence, the forgery of documents, hypocrisy, disavowal, and sheer indifference—that sought to deny certain lives the protections commonly associated with freedom and being from somewhere or having an origin. Both Cecilia Valdes and Romualdo pay close attention to these practices, showing how increasingly fundamental they were to eliding slaves’ past in the context of the illegal slave trade

Violencia, pérdidas y duelo en el cine colombiano reciente

Abstract: As Colombia faced the negotiation of a peace agreement between the government and the FARC guerrilla army, several films dealt with the challenges of a society trying to leave behind a decades-old armed conflict. This article focuses on films that shed light on the effects of such conflict, viewing them through the lens of loss—a long-lasting and irreparable consequence of violence. It discusses three films in detail: La sirga (2012), by William Vega; La tierra y la sombra (2015), by Cesar Acevedo; and Siembra (2016), by Angela Osorio and Santiago Lozano. Portraying characters that have experienced loss and inhabit a world indelibly marked by the void left by such loss, these films depict both their pain and the forces of survival that push them forward. They explore loss as an experience with political and creative potential, in which people can imagine a future where the wounds of the past are not forgotten. They also portray loss through an explora-tion of the liminal spaces of representation itself, using ambiguity and openness as a way to engage both local and international spectators.

The Place of the Journalist in Contemporary Mexico: A Case in Juárez

Abstract: Through a detailed dissection of a crime committed by a young psychopath and his two high school friends, Sandra Rodriguez Nieto offers one of the most il-luminating accounts of Ciudad Juarez in La fabrica del crimen (Temas de hoy, 2012). While most narratives about the city’s various forms of violence focus on a single issue (i.e. feminicides, narco violence, maquilas, etc.), Rodriguez Nieto, through the critical lens of impunity and its effects, presents a comprehensive review of the phenomena that have transformed Juarez into the most violent city in Mexico. This study combines textual analysis with descriptions of Rodriguez Nieto’s professional trajectory, the material conditions in which she produced her work, and the emotional challenges she faced as a journalist in Juarez. The analysis aims to understand Rodriguez Nieto’s narrative in its full and specific context as well as to reflect on what it means to work in the most dangerous country for journalists in Latin America

"Debajo de la sotana": (Re)Dressing Clerical Masculinity in Alas's La Regenta

Abstract: This article examines the seemingly contradictory embodiment of nineteenth-century discourses of masculinity by Fermin de Pas, the clerical protagonist of Leopoldo Alas’s La Regenta (1884-85). Despite its identifiable rhetoric of anticlericalism and emasculation, I argue that Clarin’s novel casts the priest-hood as a dynamic metaphor for the paradoxes inherent in nineteenth-century masculinity writ large. What I call Fermin’s clerical morphology of masculinity coalesces around two dynamically opposed modes: ostentatious self-display and ascetic self-restraint. Through his opulent liturgical dress and immaculate street-wear, Vetusta’s Magistral embodies noble patterns of masculinity that nostalgically gloss Ancien Regime social hierarchies. On the other hand, Fermin’s tightly controlled deportment and bodily self-restraint dialogue with discourses and ide-als of bourgeois masculinity that also call for men to dress austerely and abstain periodically from sex. This facet of his clerical persona is illustrated throughout the novel in Fermin’s internalized struggles with clerical behavioral patterns and dress. Through regular comparisons with contemporaneous cultural prod-ucts including pan-European conduct manuals and novels, I illustrate how La Regenta’s fashioning of Fermin de Pas indexes the priest as one of the dominant myths governing modern fantasies of masculinity

#RopaSucia and No me llamo mamacita. Illocutionary Female Power Against Street Harassment, "Locker Room Talk," and "Mansplaining"

Abstract: Through the intersectionality of a feminist approach and a phenomenological lens, this article examines groups of women who use social media to enact resis-tance against street harassment, derogatory expressions against women, piropos, and “locker room talk.” The analysis focuses on the project “#Ropasucia” by writ-ers/artists Maricela Guerrero, Paula Abramo, and Xitlali Rodriguez Mendoza,who conceived a project that forcibly identifies—by employing a public stage such as the Internet—how a perpetrator’s remarks obligate women to react and share their experiences. The artists then interpreted their project’s results using large-scale artistic installations exhibiting interior clothing and soap. In the project “No me llamo mamacita; arte vs. acoso callejero,” we explore how illocutionary forces combat verbal violence/harassment in public and semi-public spaces in the nation’s capital, Mexico City, as well as how catcalling not only affects self-esteem but translates to increased statistics of violence in both public and private spaces. In viewing violent assaults and aggression as phenomenological events, we discuss how artists convert language, “dirty laundry” (undergarments), soap, drawings, and posters into tools for writing the human, women experience as a phenomenon of a response against verbal violence. Connecting these artistic works to others similar in nature across the world, we demonstrate the global trend of women rising in resistance

Local Histories of Infamy: Photography, Popular Violence, and the Rehearsal of State Power in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Peru

Abstract: In 1858, a private citizen named Juan Fuentes submitted a petition to the Peruvian government to create a photographic registry of the nation. Following a lengthy bureaucratic debate and several subsequent proposals, the government approved a much more limited project: Fuentes would take pictures of prisoners. This essay offers a close reading of this episode, frequently retold but unanalyzed in histories of early photography. I examine the images and text from a sample register that accompanied one of Fuentes’s many petitions, situating it within the debates regarding the representation and participation of popular subjects in public life. In the most immediate sense, this artifact illustrates elites’ mounting concerns about criminality, during a time of convulsive modernization brought about by the guano export boom. More broadly, the desire to photograph prison-ers constitutes an effort to subvert collective popular identities, precisely as the corporatist social order, a vestige of the colonial era, is ceding rapidly to another based on individual rights and responsibilities. Beyond a merely disciplinary function, photography enacts an emergent form of state power that seeks to disag-gregate its own source of legitimacy, the pueblo.

Cell Phone Cinema: Latin American Horror Flicks in the Post-Digital Age

Abstract: Cell phone cinema is an emergent phenomenon well-suited for Latin American independent filmmakers. With technology that is simple to operate and low production costs, as well as open and free distribution via online streaming, cell phone cinema has arguably democratized access to filmmaking. But even as alternative production and distribution avenues liberate filmmakers, they also limit artistic potential and marginalize their films as the work of amateurs. Since cell phone cinema’s arrival in the early 2000s, filmmakers have wrestled with a paradox: they have embraced the making of films that are low-budget, transgressive, and independent, even as they strive for a higher production quality to compete with commercial cinema. Efforts to reconcile these seemingly opposing tendencies have profound repercussions on the content and aesthetics of cell phone films—works that are made close-to-the-body and are increasingly hybrid (combining digital and analog elements), characteristic of a post-digital aesthetic of glitch. This essay defines the features of global cell phone cinema and presents an overview of the format. Then, turning to Latin America, it studies three paradigmatic cell phone horror flicks, a genre with a significant presence in mobile filmmaking. Several critical questions are raised: are we experiencing a cinematic format that will change the game, from a cinema made and distrib-uted by the commercial industry to self-produced films created by autodidacts and distributed freely online? Or will these films be co-opted by market forces? I argue that whatever the future of this new format, the Latin American independent film landscape has already been significantly altered by cell phone technologies

Petroafecto: Hacia una lectura de la ubicuidad del petróleo en Pelo malo de Mariana Rondón

Abstract: In this essay, I examine how oil has shaped class, race, and gender relations as well as the spatial organization of modern societies, focusing primarily on Ven-ezuela. I use the film Pelo malo (2013) by Venezuelan director Mariana Rondon as a lens through which to analyze how oil culture has perpetuated social in-equalities by segregating and regulating the bodies of the main characters through their access to petro-based goods and services. I examine the representation of the daily lives, especially the transit practices, of the main characters—Junior (an afro-descendent, queer nine-year-old boy) and Marta (an unemployed single mother)—in the Caracas slums. The streets and bus, both dependent on oil, be-come an extension of the two characters’ home and conditions their mobility and accessibility to the city. In order to consider the profound impact of petroleum on daily life, I introduce the concept petro-affect, which I use to refer to the capac-ity of petroleum as a body to leave its imprint on other bodies and to generate changes within them. This concept addresses how oil enables and facilitates the affective relationships (both emotional and material) of modern life.

Yours Truly, Buenos Aires: Affective Distributions in the Writings of Ricardo Strafacce

Abstract: The novels La boliviana (2008) and Gerardo y Mercedes (2013), by the Ar-gentine Ricardo Strafacce, offer sweeping, chaotic tales that sprawl across varying physical and social environments that define the parameters of contemporary Buenos Aires. In presenting stories that employ parody to question delineations of class and cultural standing, Strafacce’s novels engage contemporary mass media narrative strategies that underpin a particular mode of presenting and receiving information. In so doing, Strafacce’s novels call into question the means by which mass media formats like the telenovela propagate stereotypes that permeate the urban experience of Buenos Aires. Employing a theoretical approach grounded, on one hand, in Jacques Ranciere’s concepts of the distribution of the sensible, and on the other, in Jonathan Flatley’s work on affective mapping (which itself draws upon Fredric Jameson’s cognitive mapping), I argue that Strafacce utilizes affect as a mode of intellectual comprehension in his novels. Playing upon popular, melodramatic media formats while questioning the reason and the particular sensibility in which they are rooted allows for an affective (or affected) reception of the text, running counter to mass-mediatized logic. Strafacce’s novels thus showcase an approach to narrative that employs mass media strategies while at the same time undermining the very mechanisms through which new media affects its public.

"En la memoria de los que viven": The Boundaries of History in Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo's Sumario (1526) and Historia general y natural de las Indias (1535)

Abstract: The Spanish historian Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo’s first encounter with the Taino areito in 1514, provoked a lifelong process of reflection and reevaluation of this song-and-dance ceremony. As Oviedo gains an appreciation for the areito as the vehicle par excellence through which native communities commemorate their past, he begins to consider the representation of oral traditions within historiography, particularly in relation to his own task as a historian of the New World. Ultimately, Oviedo’s reflections regarding the areito and the Spanish romance, or ballad, result in his advocating for an approach to the history of the New World that not only takes into account both its written and oral traditions but also relies on the collaboration between the two for its success.

Fragmentation and the Digital City: An Analysis of Vicente Luis Mora's Circular 07. Las afueras

Abstract: This essay juxtaposes three recent publications, Vicente Luis Mora’s Circular 07. Las afueras (2007- ), Kenneth Goldsmith’s Capital: New York, Capital of the 20th Century (2015), and Jorge Carrion’s Barcelona. Libro de los pasajes (2016), in order to explore how contemporary digital technologies construct and fragment urban experience on a global scale. Despite their different political in-tentions, these three works share a common aesthetic of appropriation, unoriginal quotation, and fragmentation, as they are also all modelled after Walter Benja-min’s Arcades Project. Just like Benjamin did with Paris, each of these works focuses on a particular Western city—Madrid, New York, and Barcelona—now being proposed as paradigmatic representations of urban experience, which is meant to mimic digital media’s modularity and disintegration. Goldsmith’s use of appropriation is read as a blank endorsement of digital mediation of everyday life, which sits in opposition to Carrion’s and Mora’s political projects. Circular07 and Barcelona mix unoriginal writing techniques, like Goldsmith’s concep-tual writing, with other experimental methods to warn readers against apoliti-cal adoption of digital technologies. Fragmentation is still proposed as the most important aesthetic form of twenty-first century writing, but these two Spanish works strive for its contextualization as a complex mechanism structured around reader/writer subjectivity. Finally, this essay ponders how to consider new reader/writer subjectivities within the larger context of global cities in late capitalism.

The Paths of Unfreedom: Indentured Labor from Yucatán to Cuba

Abstract: This article centers on an understudied aspect of Yucatan’s Caste War (1847-1901): the network of indentured labor between Yucatan and Cuba designed as a repressive measure to contain the region’s massive indigenous rebellion. The ar-ticle focuses on the debates that surrounded it. Concretely, it explores the contested notions of humanitarianism as evoked by prominent politicians who attempted to either legitimize or counter the selling of Mayan men, women, and children to plantation owners in Cuba. Within the confines of the Mexican nation, this project propelled the dispossession of communally-owned lands, appropriating them for the booming henequen economy. Internationally, it intersected with global networks of racialized coerced labor. The connections between indenture and slavery have received substantial scholarly attention, but this article instead reads indentured deployment as a penal practice.

Enmeshed Landscapes: (Re)Constructing Canal Zone Aesthetics in Las novelas canaleras

Abstract: The Canal Novel is characteristic of the political rupture of the 1960s decolonial movement in Panama, when writers and intellectuals sought to oppose US in-terventionism. This essay outlines how Gil Blas Tejeira’s Pueblos perdidosand Joaquin Beleno’s Los forzados de Gamboa situate a new political potential in the Canal Zone landscape by contesting the legacy of Theodore Roosevelt’s environmental logic as well as the importation of US imperial spatial models. In the Canal Novel, the landscape of the sublime proposed by Kant is no longer tenable: the aesthetic distance associated with the Kantian sublime is displaced by “enmeshment,” wherein humans and both organic and non-organic objects are fused together. By reading the Canal Novels against US imperial paradigms, we can better understand the racial organization of the landscape previously hidden by megaprojects like the Panama Canal.

A Trauma's History: Pablo Escobar as Ghostly Myth and the Neoliberal Social Contract

Abstract: This essay engages with the local and global meanings that Pablo Escobar has ac-quired in media representations that range from a benign father to an evil social force. It argues that the myth of Pablo Escobar, as mediated by popular culture, has a social function: rewriting the collective memory of the War on Drugs. Es-cobar has become the embodiment of national and transnational trauma, and as the media commercializes trauma, it becomes a prosthetic memory of the past. Trauma and history intersect in complex ways, especially in the War on Drugs, which is interpreted through and constructed by mass media and individual memories, because historical events remain institutional secrets. Here, I analyze the myth of Escobar as a socially symbolic act that supports the continuation of the War on Drugs. The myth of the capo represses the past as it reconstructs the historical record

Energía, termodinámica, y el imaginario tecnológico en La raza cósmica de José Vasconcelos

Abstract: In his classic essay La raza cosmica (1925), Vasconcelos devotes great attention to the Iguazu Waterfalls and the future construction of a hydro-electric power plant in this privileged natural space, dreaming of a not-too-distant-future in which the electricity produced by this power plant would secure South America’s global industrial hegemony. Through an analysis of the concept of energy in La raza cosmica and other key texts of the period such as La revulsion de la energia(1924), this paper explores how Vasconcelos’s fascination with electricity and industrial modernization unveils the key role played by the scientific discourse of thermodynamics––the field of physics that deals with energy processes––in his intellectual and political thought. Heavily influenced by the German scientist and educator Wilhelm Ostwald, Vasconcelos develops throughout the 1920s a new form of scientific idealism that fully incorporates the techno-centric imagi-nary of thermodynamics to his philosophical and aesthetic thought. By mobiliz-ing the utopian and futuristic appeal of electrical technologies in his writings, Vasconcelos vindicates a new project of Latin American modernity that fully incorporates the scientific and technological imaginary of industrial develop-ment, thus subverting the Ariesta opposition between Anglo-Saxon utilitarian materialism and Latin idealism that had dominated the continental intellectual debates since the turn of the century.

Eating (by) Oneself: The Wasteful Pleasures of Self-Cannibalism in Virgilio Piñera’s “La carne”

Abstract: This article examines the theme of self-cannibalism in Virgilio Pinera’s story “La carne” as an ethical problem and an aesthetic proposal. Written in the early 1940s, a time when meat shortages were common in Havana, the story imagines the perils and pleasures of eating one’s own flesh. Critics have so far interpreted the story either as a piece of social critique or as a tribute to human endurance. Building on the current literature, this article proposes reading “La carne” as part of a literary aesthetics Pinera develops in his collection Cuentos frios. Draw-ing on Jacques Derrida’s and Judith Butler’s ethics of alterity, I first examine self-cannibalism as a desire for autonomy that eventually severs all social ties. Through Georges Bataille’s writings on “non-productive expenditure,” I then look at how the pleasure of eating one’s own flesh complicates the ethical dimension of the story. I argue that, for Pinera, literature is self-cannibalism: an auto-affection that gratifies without glossing over absence, understood both as material lack and as the vacuity of representation. This analysis allows me to situate Pinera’s regime(n) of representation within Cuban letters, specifically vis-a-vis the neo-baroque aesthetics Jose Lezama Lima lays out in La expresion americana.

Héctor Manjarrez's Uncertainty; or, Politics Without Dogma

Abstract: Hector Manjarrez’s fictional worlds are populated by characters who are uncer-tain about their place in the Mexican Student Movement of 1968 both before and after the massacre at Tlatelolco on October 2. In contrast to the certainty that underscores the Mexican state’s paternalistic prescriptions, exclusions, and violence in the mid-twentieth century, this essay analyzes how Manjarrez de-ploys uncertainty in order to restore the potential for a democratizing politics. Through an analysis of Paris desaparece (2014), Pasaban en silencio nuestros dioses (1987), as well as the short story, “Johnny,” from Acto propiciatorio(1970), this essay explores Manjarrez’s attempt to construct secularized narra-tives of 1968 that resist defining the Tlatelolco massacre as a necessary sacrifice for future redemption. Building from that violent defeat, Manjarrez sheds the disillusionment of his generation and mobilizes literature to search for new political alternatives. Thus the literary becomes an important site from which to think and narrate a radically democratic politics for the left by making room for the contradictions and everyday indecisions of human beings whose uncertainty exceeds their dogmatic desires and programs

"El ágora entre manglares:": la arquitectura griega en El siglo de las luces de Alejo Carpentier

Abstract: This essay examines the intersections of architecture and literature in the work of Alejo Carpentier. It makes use of original research performed at the Fundacion Alejo Carpentier to analyze the role of the agora, the central square of Ancient Greece, in El siglo de las luces (1962). In that novel, Carpentier presents the agora on the island of Guadeloupe as a subversive site of social, commercial, and political action. A close study of the festive, insurgent activities of the central square in Carpentier’s work demonstrates the connections between the agora as he perceives it and Michel de Certeau’s theory of the practice of everyday life. This observation gains further meaning when the essay places the novel within the context of the oil boom in Caracas, where Carpentier lived from 1945-59. In newspaper articles he published in El Nacional in the 1950s, Carpentier declares the social function of the agora to be endangered by the new construction wave of those years. Finally, the essay shows how Carpentier gradually incorporates the chaotic new architecture of Caracas into his notion of “lo barroco americano,” thus celebrating the capacity of Latin American literature and architecture to transform disparate styles into a synthetic, resilient aesthetic vision he calls the neobaroque.

Competing Visions and Contested Spaces in La sirga and Colombia magia salvaje

Abstract: This article analyzes the construction of vision and space in two Colombian films, La sirga (William Vega, 2012), and Colombia magia salvaje (Mike Slee, 2015). I argue that the stark differences between the production processes and the aesthetic proposals of both films are illustrative of a broader and complex conversation about how to grapple with the country’s violent past, and how to face—from an economic, social, and political standpoint—the future that the post-conflict promises. I contend that, though apparently apolitical, Colombia magia salvaje mobilizes a vision of the nation profoundly related to the structural causes of violence: an exploitative and rapacious conception of the space that pres-ents the territory as ahistorical, ready for the civilizing and modernizing project. On the contrary, through its haptic reworking of the senses, La sirgaadvances an oblique and reflective mode of seeing and inhabiting the nation. Like Colombia itself, La sirga is haunted by the uncertainty and unrest that violence (re)pro-duces, and, as I show, advances a spectral spatiality that encourages novel ways of thinking about Colombia’s recent history, thus providing a viable alternative for representing complex and violent realities of the country, and aiming towards a more equitable future

Delirious Consumption: Aesthetics and Consumer Capitalism in Mexico and Brazil by Sergio Delgado Moya (review)

Abstract: It is unfortunate that few philosophers of the tradition that Dapía aims to engage are likely to read the book: they are a notoriously fickle lot and would waste no time identifying the mischaracterizations and infelicities of a non-philosopher such as Dapía, who has boldly encroached upon their terrain. This would be a loss, as the book marks a milestone in bringing some of the subtleties of Borges’s thought to bear on issues that would interest the same readers that are drawn to Davidson, Danto, Goodman, and Rorty. In fact, since most of Dapía’s readers are likely to be scholars of Hispanic literature rather than philosophers, one wonders why Borges’s works are examined exclusively in English; at the very least, the original Spanish language texts might have been included for reference. This is perhaps a matter having more to do with the publisher than the author. I’ll conclude by mentioning a line from “La biblioteca de Babel,” which, although curiously unmentioned by Dapía in her book, nevertheless seems to me to beautifully express perhaps the most engaging theme addressed by Jorge Luis Borges, Post-Analytic Philosophy, and Representation, i.e., the troubling possibility that the different conceptual schemes brought to bear in the encounter of writer and reader may finally turn out to be radically incommensurable after all. “Tú que me lees,” the narrator says, unexpectedly addressing himself directly to the reader. “¿Estás seguro de entender mi lenguaje?” It is to Dapía’s credit that we have a new set of tools with which to think about how this question may begin to be addressed.

The Violence of Everyday Life: Lope de Vega's Fuente Ovejuna as Urban Allegory

Abstract: In the wake of Spain’s economic crisis and the accompanying surge of anti-austerity social movements such as 15M, theater groups and dramatists in Ma-drid looked to Spanish playwright Felix Lope de Vega y Carpio’s canonical play Fuente Ovejuna with renewed interest. This paper discusses two interpretations of the play that emerged from this trend: one staged in the central patio of a classic corrala in Aranjuez in 2013 by the theater collective AlmaViva Teatro, and the other a 2015 adaptation by dramatist Juan Mayorga performed by the theater group La Joven Compania in the Centro Cultural Conde Duque. I argue that the script adaptations and the staging used by each performance demonstrate how Fuente Ovejuna remains a compelling alegoria de poder for contemporary society by emphasizing the original work’s preoccupations with the relationship between violence, power, and sovereignty. I also contend that they should be understood within the geography of the city and the architectural legacy of the respective performance sites. These adaptations resonate deeply with the material realities of the contemporary city and the spatial politics of cultural production during Spain’s economic crisis and its aftermath

Vidas e historias de guerra: los proyectos biográficos de Aurora Cáceres y Soledad Acosta de Samper

Abstract: This article analyzes two overlooked texts in the corpus of war narratives from Latin America, the Biografia del General Joaquin Acosta (1901) by Colombi-an author Soledad Acosta de Samper and La Campana del la Brena. Memorias del Mariscal del Peru D. Andres Avelino Caceres (1921) by Peruvian writer and activist Aurora Caceres. Written by two women who were also the daughters of the men whose lives are narrated, these works offer extraordinary examples of how women dealt with war, war writing, and history as a discipline that traditionally disregarded female participation. The study focuses on the women’s use of biography as a seemingly gender appropriate approach to history and war, the alternative representations of national heroes they offer when recounting the life of their fathers, and the discursive strategies female authors utilize in order to authorize themselves in the fields of history and war writing