Previous Issue Article Abstracts
Volume 90, Number 1, Winter 2022
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ARTICLES
The Allegory of the Meat Market in Amores perros: Cannibalism, Consumption, and Money
Michael Abeyta
This article argues that the allusions to cannibalism through snippets of text that appear on screen and the insistent representation of commodity and monetary exchange through visual associations, montage, framing, and dialogue establish an undeniable cause–effect, social relationship between money and violence. This indictment is bolstered by a complex network of interweaving stories and multilayered imagery that comprises an allegory of cannibalistic capitalism in Mexico on the eve of the twenty-first century. In this light, the figure of the neoliberal cannibal, the entrepreneur engaged in the commodification of violence, profiting from murder and the spectacle of violence, personifies this allegorical critique of neoliberalism. This interpretation of the film's complex allegory centered on the image of a meat market as a metaphor for cannibalistic capitalism includes a preliminary discussion of the interrelationship between violence, neoliberalism, and cannibalism, followed by a close analysis of the visual language and dialogue.
El presente estudio examina las actividades literarias de las poetas españolas de entreguerras y las conexiones que establecieron con figuras de la vanguardia latinoamericana. Con el fin de remediar la exclusión de las poetas mujeres de la llamada "Generación de 1927", se examina el papel de la mujer moderna como mediadora cultural no solo en España, sino también a nivel internacional. Más precisamente, se aborda la participación de Concha Méndez, Josefina de la Torre, Pilar de Zubiaurre y Carmen Conde en el núcleo artístico y literario madrileño Lyceum Club Femenino así como en el grupo de vanguardia Amistades Hispano-Belga-Americanas fundado en 1932 en Bruselas bajo la tutela de Paul Vanderborght. Estos dos grupos literarios servirán de base para un análisis de los intercambios culturales entre España, Bélgica y América Latina. Al situar a las poetas españolas en un contexto internacional, este estudio arroja luz sobre su participación en la escena literaria y sobre el impacto que ellas tuvieron más allá de las fronteras nacionales.
E agora? Lembra-me: Una genealogía de las películas del VIH desde la supervivencia
Alberto Carpio Jiménez
¿Cómo puede una película enfrentarse a la muerte de quien la está realizando? Esta cuestión fue especialmente clave en el cine de la década del 90, producido por cineastas homosexuales con el VIH. Sin embargo, a mediados de la década, los nuevos tratamientos evitan la identificación del VIH con una muerte segura, y estas películas desaparecieron. En E agora? Lembra-me (Portugal, 2013), Joaquim Pinto, como un superviviente con el VIH, recupera esta tradición del cine en primera persona que confronta la propia muerte. En este artículo trazo una redefinición de qué es sobrevivir en la película de Pinto, a través de su propia genealogía en tres películas de los noventa. Pinto aporta una nueva idea de supervivencia, más allá de la autobiografía individual, criticando el concepto darwinista asociado a la evolución y el progreso. Su experiencia con el VIH le permite reconceptualizar su modo de comprender la enfermedad y la vida desde la supervivencia.
El monstruo en el espejo: Diversiones públicas e identidad individual en Avecilla (1882) de Clarín
Ramón Espejo-Saavedra
El cuento Avecilla, publicado por Leopoldo Alas "Clarín" en 1882, se centra en el encuentro entre un humilde oficinista y una mujer monstruosa en una feria popular. Clarín utiliza este episodio para explorar la manera en que las formas de diversión pública reflejan la relación entre el individuo y las estructuras sociales, culturales y políticas que dan sentido a su experiencia. En particular, el autor sugiere que la distinción entre lo "normal" y lo "anormal" constituye la base de una gran variedad de discursos de la época mientras satiriza las ansiedades de clase social y género del protagonista, cuyo concepto de sí mismo depende del establecimiento de jerarquías sociales y culturales.
The Proletarian Commune in Veracruz: José Mancisidor's La ciudad roja
Alfonso Fierro
In La ciudad roja, Mancisidor rewrites the 1922 tenant strikes in the city of Veracruz, a social movement that managed to paralyze the city's economy throughout that year. In this article, we discuss the novel in relation to the larger ambitions and objectives of the collective project of "proletarian literature." The article focuses on three aspects of the novel: first, the process of historical rewriting that frames, selects, and erases different elements of the Veracruz tenant strikes; second, the novel's account of the communal urban space that emerged during the rent strikes; and finally, the relation presented in the novel between the artist-leader of the tenant movement and the proletarian masses. We will suggest that this may be understood as a novelization or a novelized debate of the aesthetic and political program of proletarian literature as a whole.
Berganza's "buen natural" and the Theriophily of El casamiento engañoso and Coloquio de los perros
Luis Rodríguez-Rincón
Miguel de Cervantes found animals to be productive, if polyvalent, mirrors through which humanity could understand its place in the natural order. While the specular role of animals in human attempts at self-definition might seem at odds with the goals of Animal Studies today, there is great value in appraising Cervantine theriophily. From Plutarch to Montaigne, theriophily questioned anthropocentrism by comparing the ills of human society to the order of the animal world. This comparison between humans and animals was central to how Cervantes's Casamiento–Coloquio questioned anthropocentrism, as Campuzano's descent into animality at the hands of Estefanía de Caicedo results in a dialogue between dogs that prefer their canine "buen natural" to the prospect of a latent humanity. Foregrounding the specular thinking between humans and dogs, art and nature, reveals the roots, as well, of Berganza's racism, as the logic of animal husbandry is projected back onto humans.
BOOK REVIEWS
Machado de Assis and Narrative Theory: Language, Imitation, Art, and Verisimilitude in the Last Six Novels by Earl E. Fitz (review)
Carlos Cortez Minchillo
Anarchaeologies: Reading as Misreading by Erin Graff Zivin (review)
Shannon Dowd
Ficciones de verdad: archivo y narrativas de vida by Patricia López-Gay (review)
Ignasi Gozalo-Salellas
Defiant Geographies: Race and Urban Space in 1920s Rio de Janeiro by Lorraine Leu (review)
Beatriz Jaguaribe
Books Received
Volume 89, Number 4, Autumn 2021
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ARTICLES
In Toletum daemones: el deán de Santiago, don Yllán de Toledo y la ética de la sapiencia
E. Michael Gerli
In addition to comprising an admonition against ingratitude (the traditional interpretation), Exemplum XI of the Libro del Conde Lucanor reveals a key ideological distinction in the book. It reveals a pronounced tension between the emerging world of lay intellectuals, the science of the so-called “Long Thirteenth Century,” and the Church, just when the conflict between them was being contested in universities and studia generalia throughout Christendom. When read in this larger cultural context, the exemplum discloses an awareness of the power of knowledge, and the struggle for its vigilance and ethical control, a theme disputed well beyond the death of Thomas Aquinas (1274), for whom knowledge should be regulated by a moral philosophy—a code of ethics or a deontology—that orders and disciplines the passions. In this fashion, Exemplum XI captures a decisive moment in the ethical socialization and secularization of knowledge, just as knowledge is recognized as a formidable instrument for good and evil.
Ser una y muchas: mujeres nómadas en Gavieras de Aurora Luque
Josefa Álvarez Valadés
In this paper we intend to study some of the female figures to which the poet Aurora Luque gives voice or with whom her poetic voice dialogues in her most recent collection of poems, Gavieras. Luque vindicates through them the power of writing to “translate” the world into verses where metapoetry reaches a starring role and in which the claim to freedom and “urgent enjoyment” is not forgotten in the face of the fragility of existence. And it will do so by evoking the figure of unique women of yesterday and today that converge, in turn, in the author herself. For its study we will draw on the theory of nomadic subjects by Rosi Braidotti.
El soldado en los cuentos de Clarín: patria y patriotería en tiempos de desterritorialización
Nuria Godón
This article focuses on the portrayal of soldiers in seven short stories by Clarín published between 1892 and 1896 as a narrative strategy to treat different uses of the term patria in the context of colonial struggle and territorial loss. These short stories break with the recurrent image of the idealized soldier to reveal the demagogical and doctrinaire sense of patriotería while contrasting it with the emotional and spiritual sense of patria. I argue that in his representation of the soldier, Clarín deploys social class components to forge a sense of fraternal solidarity among oppressed people to reach a higher identification with the Other. By establishing connections between the loss of the colonies and the eviction of the soldiers from their family homes in the metropole, the author problematizes the national allegory of the family.
Sticky Affections: María Zambrano’s “La Cuba secreta” and Transatlantic Relationality
Ian Russell
“La Cuba Secreta” (1948) has been a germinal text for the study of exiled Spanish writer María Zambrano’s work on national, poetic, and subjective identity formation. In this essay, I focus specifically on the apego (attachment) she feels for Cuba in order to explore how affective relations, for Zambrano, could potentially avoid the violent hierarchies imposed by Enlightenment values. I analyze the sites where apego signals an intersubjective immersion as a mode of radically anti-Enlightenment relationality. However, while the sticky relation between Zambrano and the island might avoid Rationalism’s destructive subject–object boundaries, it is also tethered to the destruction of subjectivity occasioned by the island’s racial and colonial traumas. Ultimately, I suggest that Zambrano’s apego is a compelling example of relations for the field of Transatlantic Studies that wishes to avoid the hierarchies of modernity while still bringing to the surface the traumas and violence of racism and colonialism.
Adapting Diana of Belflor: The Dog in the Manger’s Soviet Adventures
Veronica Ryjik
Before Pilar Miro’s famous filmic adaptation of The Dog in the Manger, Lope de Vega’s masterpiece had been successfully brought to the small screen in Soviet Russia. The Leningrad director Yan Frid’s 1977 musical comedy Sobaka na Sene (The Dog on the Hay), while almost unknown in the West, is considered a classic of Soviet cinema. This article explores the reasons behind the extraordinary popularity of this television film in relation to the Russian Lopean performance canon, as well as to the specific sociocultural conditions of the Stagnation era. I argue that, by prioritizing the issue of gender relations over the conflict of honor, Sobaka na sene managed to inscribe new cultural meanings in the story of the Countess of Belflor and her secretary and, therefore, to bring Lope’s play closer to the Soviet viewers of the late 1970s.
Madrid, meridiano intelectual ibérico (la polémica peninsular de La Gaceta Literaria)
Antonio Sáez Delgado
In 1927, the Spanish magazine La Gaceta Literaria published the well-known editorial entitled “Madrid, meridiano intelectual de Hispanoamérica,” which defended the need for Madrid to be the intellectual point of reference for Latin America. This same position, with a deep ideological charge, was also present at the base of another, lesser known but also very important, debate, the one promoted in the Iberian Peninsula with Portugal and Catalonia, territories which this publication directed by Ernesto Giménez Caballero approached with the interest of adding them to the cause of a centralist cultural policy with an inevitable seat in Madrid. Through the approach to Catalonia, by means of a supposed strategy of defense of the peninsular plurality, an orchestrated campaign was actually mounted based on the unbreakable unity of Spain, whose culture would be presented—although with equally negative results—to Portugal and Latin America, as a real possibility for opposing French international hegemony.
Book Review
Dematerialization: Art and Design in Latin America by Karen Benezra (review)
Tom McEnaney
Volume 89, Number 3, Summer 2021
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ARTICLES
Este artículo afirma que las “Cartas nigrománticas” incluidas en la novela de Victoriano Salado Álvarez no son idénticas a las cartas que el Nigromante mandó entre 1863 y 1865 a Guillermo Prieto. Salado insertó los textos apócrifos en sus Episodios nacionales mexicanos a manera de una ficción fundacional. Trató de justificar el régimen de Porfirio Díaz en el que cumplía roles políticos importantes mediante la manipulación del pasado y la reconstrucción y reconfiguración de personajes como Ignacio Ramírez y Benito Juárez. La última parte del artículo es a la vez un recordatorio y una autocrítica. La falta de cuidado filológico y la eficacia de las técnicas de las ficciones fundacionales tuvo como resultado que ciertas investigaciones (incluyendo la de quien suscribe este texto) internalizaran la narrativa saladiana y, de esta manera, analizaran las ideas contestatarias de Ramírez como estabilizadoras para la ideología y cultura del Porfiriato.
“Printed Matter”: Rodrigo Lira’s Visual Antipoetics
Rachel Robinson
Known as a “manipulador del lenguaje” by his contemporaries, the Chilean poet Rodrigo Lira (1949–1981) has barely made it onto the international poetry stage for his biting and striking antipoetics. While his poetry has especially been recognized for his semantic wit in his almost sardonic parodies of his predecessors and contemporaries, Lira’s antipoetic work, I propose, gathers force with his attention to the visual aspects of language on the page that both informs and is informed by language’s materiality. I argue that it is through Lira’s manipulation of language and poetry’s visual qualities that his commitment to social critique comes to the fore. The reader can interact with Lira’s poems as physical objects not only intellectually, but also by engaging multiple senses. Through close readings of exemplary poems, I consider how his manipulation of the letter, the word, the line, and the page itself contributes to his antipoetics.
Cultural Politics of the Emotions Portrayed in Sara Mesa’s Short Fiction
Marta Pérez-Carbonell
This article proposes a close reading of Sara Mesa’s short fiction, Mala letra (2016), through the lens of affect theory. It follows the underpinnings that form the core of The Cultural Politics of Emotion by Sara Ahmed (2004), where she dedicates one chapter to each emotion. The analysis in this article focuses on Ahmed’s discussion of pain, hate, fear, and disgust in order to frame Mesa’s fiction, which will allow us to shed light on the intricacies of Mesa’s depictions of these emotions in five selected short stories. Through this theoretical framework and a close textual analysis, this article will examine the revelatory nature of emotions, as well as the social and political structures that contain them.
Imágenes del Madrid de la posguerra: barrios en ruinas y escasez de vivienda en los chistes de Mingote
Reyes Vila-Belda
Al acabar la Guerra Civil, Madrid era una ciudad en ruinas. Francisco Franco prometió solucionar el problema acuciante de la vivienda e impulsó su rehabilitación como parte de su política imperial de la “Nueva España”. Creía que la arquitectura y el urbanismo debían expresar su triunfo y servir a su retórica propagandística. Pero la autarquía paralizó esos proyectos y durante años los madrileños sobrevivieron entre cascotes. Las ruinas eran memorias del trauma de la contienda, además de una realidad silenciada por la censura. Antonio Mingote publicó en los años cincuenta muchos chistes sobre los problemas de urbanismo en el diario ABC. Sus viñetas circunnavegaron la censura y construyeron un contradiscurso que contrastaba la ficción del discurso oficial de la victoria con la realidad urbana. Mingote resignificó el triunfalismo y los mitos imperiales de Franco, a la vez que despertó en los lectores una visión crítica.
Retratos de ciudad en el costumbrismo latinoamericano: espacio urbano, tradición, modernidad y progreso
Gabriela Escobar Rodríguez
Los cuadros de costumbres están íntimamente ligados al tránsito de Latinoamérica a la modernidad; en ellos se negocia constantemente el significado de lo nacional, lo tradicional, lo civilizado, lo bárbaro y lo moderno. Los escritores costumbristas tuvieron diferentes aproximaciones a estos conceptos; sin embargo, la mayoría compartió un elemento fundamental al cual los estudios costumbristas no han dado la debida importancia: el protagonismo literario de la ciudad. Y es que hablar de modernidad en Latinoamérica implica un diálogo con el espacio predilecto donde se concretó y concentró la modernización de las jóvenes repúblicas.
Este estudio analiza, a través de la imagen de ciudad presentada en una selección de cuadros de costumbres escritos por Juan Manuel Cagigal, Ramón Rojas y Cañas, Daniel Mendoza, Manuel Atanasio Fuentes, José María Vergara y Vergara y Nicanor Bolet Peraza, la ambivalencia en la valoración del espacio urbano como símbolo de la modernización, su evolución y los cambios que conceptos como civilización, barbarie y progreso sufrieron a lo largo del siglo XIX.
REVIEWS
Beyond Babel: Translations of Blackness in Colonial Peru and New Granada by Larissa Brewer-García (review)
Nicholas R. Jones
Ophelia: Shakespeare and Gender in Contemporary Spain by Sharon Keefe Ugalde (review)
Lindsey Reuben Muñoz
Volume 89, Number 2, Spring 2021
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ARTICLES
¿A quién se dirige Diario de Djelfa, de Max Aub? Un análisis del destinatario lírico
Goretti Ramírez
Diario de Djelfa, by Max Aub, is structured along two axes. On the one hand, as proposed by most studies, its interpretation can be focused on the subject who enunciates these poems to represent, in a more or less plausible fashion (with greater or lesser fidelity to the memories of the vanquished), his experience (and his presence) in the concentration camp. On the other, it is possible to redirect its interpretation towards a less considered second axis: not the addresser of the poems, but the addressee. Who is Diario de Djelfa addressed to? The difficulty of answering this question unveils a complexity which allows us to discover the multiform nature of the addressee (who, indeed, repeatedly turns up as an impossible recipient), and, by extension, to reinterpret the extent of the testimonial nature of the book itself. In order to deepen this approach, this article draws on Jonathan Culler's three types of lyric address.
De reliquias fantasmagóricas: la fábula de Ángelo y Klaus o Tras el cristal (1986) como emblema de trauma
Carmen Moreno-Díaz
This article explores Agustí Villaronga's Tras el cristal (1986)by focusing on the iron lung, Klaus's notebook, and photography as relics whose liminality configures a traumatic spectral past that haunts Angelo. As traces of a past ineffectively buried, these artifacts condemn Angelo to relive the abuses he suffered, progressively dispossessing him of his voice and turning him into his own abuser. As a result, Angelo performs ritualistic, mimetic murders as a means of understanding and exorcising his own trauma. Klaus's murder illustrates the superposition and confusion of times and voices, as well as the propagation of violence perpetuated now on Rena. The end of the movie is suspended and frozen in a crystal ball, a new relic and enigma to decipher, the epitome of an emblem of trauma that has presented the fable of Klaus and Angelo in the universal power dynamic of victim and abuser.
Duelo, escritura de la vida y memoria en Canción de tumba (2011) de Julián Herbert
Iván Pérez Daniel
El artículo analiza la manera en que Canción de tumba (2011) de Julián Herbert articula el proceso de duelo por la muerte de su madre con el pasado político y el presente de violencia en el México de la así llamada "Guerra contra las drogas" ejecutada a partir del gobierno del Presidente Calderón (2006-2012). Con base en una lectura detallada y cercana de la novela, el estudio se centra en las representaciones del tiempo y el espacio. Como la mayor parte de la novela ocurre en espacios transicioneales o "no-lugares", según la noción de Marc Augé, se argumenta que el proceso de duelo es imposible producto de las masacres ocurridas en el contexto de esos años, y también por la alienación que sufre el narrador debido a la debilitada noción de comunidad. A partir de los planteamientos de Robert Pogue Harrison sobre los lugares y representaciones de la muerte y los ritos mortuorios, se argumenta que la novela ensaya una reconstrucción de la idea de comunidad a partir de la memoria colectiva acompañada de una puntual revisión crítica del pasado político en México.
Orphans of Orpheus: Music Lost and Regained in Spanish Golden Age Poetry
Lorena Uribe Bracho
Early modern Spanish lyric's connections with music are manifold, and imagery of instruments and singing voices is virtually everywhere in the texts, often playing a part in the articulation of affect and providing a vocabulary for poets to reflect about their own verbal powers. And yet, as I argue in this article, the story of Golden Age lyric begins with tension and conflict at the center of the music–poetry relation. There is, I contend, a discrepancy between the Orphean tropes that equate writing verse with playing music, and the relative autonomy that poetry and music were developing in Renaissance Spain. In this context, I draw attention to a nostalgia that cuts across the texts: the sense that poets have only inherited one half of Orpheus's torrential and effective mixture of media, poetry, and song. To make these points, I draw from a collection of printed and manuscript sources from 1500 to 1700, by poets canonical and obscure.
Posverdad como "superhistoria" de la Guerra Civil Española en El monarca de las sombras, de Javier Cercas
Sergio Restrepo Mesa
En El monarca de las sombras Javier Cercas examina la vida de su tío abuelo Manuel Mena, que muere en la batalla del Ebro en 1938 durante la Guerra Civil Española. En esta novela, Cercas yuxtapone su voluntad literaria y su vocación historicista para investigar las razones que llevaron a Mena a incorporarse a la Falange y a enrolarse en el ejército franquista, dando así su vida por los ideales de los rebeldes. Teniendo en cuenta la imposibilidad de las historiografías moderna y posmoderna para elaborar discursos narrativos que representen objetivamente la realidad, este trabajo estudia esta novela como un ejercicio de "metamnesia", una memoria de una memoria, del que surge una reconstrucción posverdadera de la Guerra Civil en forma de narración hipermoderna, una "superhistoria" que rebasa los límites de la historia como gran-narrativa moderna y como simulacro relativista posmoderno.
REVIEWS
La huella del exilio en la narrativa de Xavier Benguerel (Francia 1939, Chile 1940–1952) by Carles Cortés Orts (review)
Jordi Cornellà Detrell
Immaculate Conceptions: The Power of the Religious Imagination in Early Modern Spain by Rosilie Hernández (review)
Laura Keyt
Despertarse de Europa: arte, literatura, euroescepticismo by Luis Martín-Estudillo (review)
Marta Manrique-Gómez
Volume 89, Number 1, Winter 2021
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ARTICLES
Escribir la auralidad:: Listening in and to Rulfo
Sam Carter
This article argues for a shift toward aurality and away from the emphasis on orality that has long been a keynote in criticism about the work of Juan Rulfo. To attend to the ears that listen rather than solely the voice that speaks, I not only consider the Jaliscan writer's entire oeuvre but also turn to a seldom-studied yet readily available archive: Rulfo's recordings of a few stories from El llano en llamas and two fragments from Pedro Páramo. Addressing these audio versions amplifies the importance of the aural throughout Rulfo's writings and expands on the readings of other critics who examine some of the sounds that echo across his works but who rarely acknowledge the constitutive role of the listener. And just as Rulfo's own experiences with tape reveal these listening techniques, his representations of other sound reproduction technologies portray the effects of changing aural perceptions and practices
El archivo visual y la memoria literaria de la Transición, dos instantáneas posfotográficas: Javier Cercas y Marta Sanz
Àlex Matas Pons
Este artículo aborda el auge de la cultura visual en la literatura española y, en particular, el papel que desempeña el archivo visual sobre la Transición en las tramas literarias contemporáneas. En primer lugar, se define el nuevo régimen visual contemporáneo desde los presupuestos de la teoría estética y la crítica de las ideologías para explicar cómo la digitalización ha extendido el valor de lo serial, y no de lo único e irrepetible. En este contexto, llamado posfotográfico, el valor documental de lo fotográfico se ha visto alterado y ya no posee la función verificadora que tuvo cuando se almacenaba física y materialmente en los archivos históricos. Los almacenes de la memoria colectiva se conforman hoy según el paradigma de la inmaterialidad que dictan las nuevas tecnologías para la captación de imágenes. El artículo explica cómo determina el análisis político y cultural de la Transición la manera en que el escritor incluye este archivo visual de la memoria colectiva en su obra. Esta explicación se realiza en particular mediante el comentario crítico de las obras de Javier Cercas y Marta Sanz.
Comedia palatina y límites genéricos: El perro del hortelano en su contexto mediterráneo
Juan Udaondo Alegre
En este trabajo sugiero que el análisis de algunos episodios de El perro del hortelano a través de su verosímil contexto mediterráneo puede ayudar a matizar su adscripción al género de las comedias palatinas. Con ello quiero aportar claves para entender cómo Lope, en un período de madurez creativa, no solo reorienta y actualiza el material literario de sus fuentes, sino que también muestra una vez más que la mezcla e hibridación de géneros está en la base de la Comedia Nueva. A lo largo del artículo complemento diversas aportaciones críticas sobre la obra con los así llamados Estudios Mediterráneos, analizo múltiples rasgos dramáticos de la pieza vinculados a este mar, e incido especialmente en su ingeniosa conclusión; finalmente propongo una explicación respecto de por qué Lope elige para resolver la trama que el gracioso encarne precisamente a un mercader intermediario greco-armenio, una figura solo entendible a principios del siglo XVII.
José Vasconcelos's Plant Theory: The Life of Plants, Botanical Ethics, and the Cosmic Race
Jorge Quintana-Navarrete
This article explores the representations of plant life and botanical ethics in José Vasconcelos's philosophical work. Drawing from some ideas of so-called critical plant studies, I investigate the ontological, political, and ecological implications of Vasconcelos's plant theory. I contend that it is a set of suggestions that ultimately put pressure on the stability of his own philosophical and political thought. The article focuses on two aspects of vegetal life that Vasconcelos highlights and theorizes: consciousness and collectivity. While the idea of plant consciousness as a tight interweaving of organic and inorganic elements tends to destabilize the anthropomorphic notion of human consciousness, plant collectivity stages a contingent and proliferating multiplicity that resists its domestication into a stable totality. In this way, Vasconcelos's encounter with plants suddenly uncovers the possibility of an ecological and anarchic thought. In the last section, I examine how these philosophical ideas about plants shed new light and cast an innovative image of La raza cósmica.
Spain, Made in Catalonia: Mechanics of Spanish Nation-Building in the Television Series 50 años de
Andrés Zamora
In 2009, Spanish public broadcaster RTVE released 50 años de, a series of documentaries on Spanish cultural icons, trends, and audiovisual memories of the last fifty years. Within that framework, its episodes seem to work towards the felicitous continuation of the Renanian vote for the Spanish nation. The series, which draws its raw materials from the vast archive of RTVE, attempts to achieve that purpose by persistently putting to work different structural and formal devices in the filmic treatment of the selected footage. There is nothing intrinsically extraordinary in this, except for the cultural perplexity that it produced in one of the most contentious peripheries of that Spanish nation, Catalonia, and on the very cusp of divisive times. Through my analysis, I show some peculiarities of nation formation in postdictatorial Spain. I also posit that this peculiar peripheral construction of the nation is not that extraordinary throughout the history of Spain.
REVIEWS
Cuban Literature in the Age of Black Insurrection: Manzano, Plácido, and Afro-Latino Religion by Mathew Pettway (review)
R. J. Boutelle
This Ghostly Poetry: History and Memory of Exiled Spanish Republican Poets by Daniel Aguirre-Oteiza (review)
Juan F. Egea
Japanese Brazilian Saudades: Diasporic Identities and Cultural Production by Ignacio López-Calvo (review)
Suma Ikeuchi
Hercules and the King of Spain: Icons of Masculinity and Nation in Calderón's Spain by Dian Fox (review)
Lucas A. Marchante-Aragón
Volume 88, Number 4, Autumn 2020
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ARTICLES
Antonio Machado en diálogo con Emmanuel Lévinas: el compromiso con la objetividad y la otredad
Nicolás Fernández-Medina
This article offers a comparative reading of Antonio Machado and Emmanuel Lévinas. This comparative reading highlights the affinities between Machado’s and Lévinas’s thinking, particularly in terms of the key concepts of objectivity and otherness. Undoubtedly, in placing Machado in dialogue with Lévinas—a critical exchange that has not been tackled in any systematic manner to date—will help us discern in what respect Machado pioneered a philosophy of otherness.
El archivo uruguayo de los muertos: Delmira Agustini, materialidad y sobrevida sintética
Javier Guerrero
This article explores the relationship between archive and death through an analysis of the collected papers of the Uruguayan poet Delmira Agustini. It posits that her collection, housed in the National Library of Uruguay, intensifies the excess of life by confusing organic and synthetic bodies, with a special emphasis on the synthetic bodies of dolls. The article insists that novel stagings of gender, as well as the choreographies and materialities of the archive, bestow the authorial body with a new future, or an afterlife. This afterlife requires the compulsive summoning and citation of the author’s cadaver and remains. The Uruguayan repository demonstrates how a writer’s archive becomes a sort of doll house, in which the miniature figure of the author can activate its latent potential to transform, emancipate, or reproduce. Finally, it reveals the power of the archive to exert a material influence on the author’s life and strict gender of the body.
The Stone Ghost: The Undead in El burlador de Sevilla y convidado de piedra
Emmy Herland
Tirso de Molina’s philandering Don Juan finds his downfall in the Stone Guest. This reanimated tomb effigy of Don Gonzalo pulls Don Juan to hell in the final act of El burlador de Sevilla y convidado de piedra. Don Juan’s life of transgressions has upset both societal and divine order, so his punishment must be enacted in both spheres. In this paper, I consider the Stone Guest, who returns to the world of the living to mete out Don Juan’s punishment, to be a ghostly figure. As an undead apparition, the Stone Guest occupies a space between life and death, which positions him as the only character capable of enacting complete justice. I further examine the ways in which Don Gonzalo’s execution of justice, both human and divine, contributes to the 16th century’s de auxiliis debates regarding the influence of free will and divine control in man’s life.
La “política cultural de las emociones” en La Tribuna de Emilia Pardo Bazán
Montserrat Amores
Emilia Pardo Bazán created in Amparo, the main character in La Tribuna, one of the first republican leaders represented in nineteenth-century Spanish literature. In the character three different roles converge in conflict with one another: gender, social and political roles. This conflict can be better understood when analyzing the novel as the story of the formation and rise of a revolutionary leader from the representation of emotions and their role in the novel. The paper studies the character as “being emotional,” based on the theoretical framework offered by Sarah Ahmed’s The Cultural Politics of Emotions. For this purpose, each one of the facets of Amparo will be taken into account: as a woman, as a worker, as a speaker, and as a mother. Its application will consider three levels of analysis: emotions and their actions in the words of the characters and in the plot; the narrative voice generating emotions; and, ultimately, the author’s voice.
Devotional Reading and the Visual Dynamics of La passion del eterno principe (Burgos, 1493?)
Isidro J. Rivera
This essay explores the technologies of reading and visualization in La passion del eterno principe (Burgos, 1493?). Early printed texts generated a material relationship between the text and image that allowed the readers to process words and images without interference and to construct meaning from their interplay. The distinctiveness of this incunable resides in its deployment of dynamic visual and verbal codes that offered laypeople a framework for empathetic meditation focused on Christ’s suffering and its salvific consequences within the Christian life.
The Work of Art in the Age of Advertising: The Case of Estridentismo
Brais Outes
This paper analyzes the intense engagement of Estridentismo—Mexico’s most important avant-garde literary movement of the 1920s—with the contemporary culture of advertising. By focusing specifically on Manuel Maples Arce’s manifesto Actual Nº 1 and Germán List Arzubide’s El movimiento estridentista, this paper shows the ambiguous attitude of Estridentism otowards advertising. On the one hand, Estridentista artists showed a true fascination with advertising as a new artistic paradigm that, like the avant-garde project, broke with traditional artistic precepts. Despite their aesthetic attraction to advertising, both Maples Arce and List Arzubide used parody to mimic the discourse of marketing to criticize the culture of mass consumption that characterized contemporary capitalism. Through their parodic appropriation of advertising, both authors claim humor as an effective tool of political and social critique that challenges the economic values and literary expectations of their audiences.
REVIEWS
Poesía, ideología e historia: siglos XX y XXI by Juan José Lanz (review)
Luis Martín-Estudillo
El actor borbónico (1700–1831) by Joaquín Álvarez Barrientos (review)
Scott Dale
Volume 88, Number 3, Summer 2020
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ARTICLES
"Yo no soy un hombre": Masculinity, Monstrosity, and Gothic Conventions in Galdós's La sombra (1871)
Wan Sonya Tang
This article examines how the Gothic elements of Galdós's novel La sombra (1871) facilitate the exploration of a late nineteenth-century crisis of masculinity as embodied in the protagonist, Anselmo. It proposes that La sombra depicts the impossibility of the bourgeois male ideal by casting this figure in a spectral form while simultaneously characterizing Anselmo, who fails to meet hegemonic masculine standards, as a monster. In this reading, the novel acknowledges the negative effects of unrealistic gender expectations by portraying the protagonist's progressive monstrosity as a consequence of his growing awareness of the shortcomings in his gender performance. The dual processes of spectralization and demonization at work in the text suggest that, beyond censuring an individual male's bad behavior, Galdós's novel problematizes the social pressures surrounding bourgeois masculinity that can potentially drive men to violence.
Whereas modern critics have considered Juan de la Cueva's Tragedia de los siete infantes de Lara (1579) unappealing compared to Lope's 1612 version of the story and discussed the Sevillian playwright's misguided use of classical tragic genre conventions, the present essay proposes a framework for understanding the play that is neither Lopean nor classicist. Arguing that the heart of Infantes is a pervading sense of metaphysical absence, it suggests that the play can be meaningfully construed as an early example of the "mourning play," or that mixture of history play and tragedy which the German philosopher-critic Walter Benjamin presented as the central late-Renaissance aesthetic form of historical contemplation in his Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (1925; The Origin of German Tragic Drama). Cueva's history of the House of Lara can be construed, that is, as a play which is concerned not so much with this or that historical person or event as with—unideal, broken, amputated—history itself.
Queering the Paternal Archive: Photography, Hybridity and Embodiment in Pilar Monsell's África 815
Sarah Thomas
This essay analyzes Spanish filmmaker Pilar Monsell's 2014 documentary África 815, an account of her father's complex history, including professional and personal failures. It shows how the film creates proximity within distance, constructing a nuanced account of Manuel Monsell's life, which, without explicitly condemning its thorniest elements (and in particular his Orientalist fetishizing of younger Maghrebi men), nonetheless refuses to gloss over them. Rather, the filmmaker lays bare her father's vulnerabilities and faults so the spectator may come to his or her own conclusions about Manuel's actions and experiences. This process is achieved through several key filmic tactics, explored here: hybridity, tactility, silence, slowness, and voice. Analyzing these strategies, the essay traces how the filmmaker's gaze on the narrative of her father's past uncovers meaning by engaging in an embodied and attentive reading of a life history that resists both binary identities and easy narrative legibility.
A vida é sonho: Mundos imaginados e "comunidade latina" em O hipnotizador – El hipnotizador
Ada Cristina Machado da Silveira
The article presents an analysis of the TV series The Hypnotist, a drama produced and aired by HBO Latin American Group's cable TV channel in its sixth original production and first bilingual series. The notion of semiotic diacritics of cultural (dis)continuities, such as heteroglossia, chronotopes, and spatiotemporal hybridity, is key to my examination of the series. I apply procedures of inversion, discontinuity, specificity, and discursive exteriority throughout the text. My analysis proposes the concept of mediascape as appropriate to the audiovisual product, given the purpose of exploring the cross-border condition of the "Latin community," converting aspects of mobility and fluidity into media capital that the various production teams can leverage. From the perspective of the audience, the mediascape that is engendered leads to migratory, mobile, and resettled communities, setting up implications and encouraging agendas to change the future and general expectations.
Humans in Bestiaries: The Case of 200 años de monstruos y maravillas argentinas
Ailén Cruz
The resurgence of the medieval bestiary in contemporary Hispanic literature has resulted in increasingly creative interpretations of the genre. Among these interpretations is 200 años de monstruos y maravillas argentinas (2015) compiled by Gabo Ferro, illustrated by Christian Montenegro, and designed by Laura Varsky. This article explores the ontological debate that ensues from 200 años's choice to place humans in literary spaces traditionally reserved for animals. 200 años compiles documentation denoting Argentine history's dark underbelly, brandishing the word bestia to blur the line between "appropriate" and "marginalized" historical subjects. In this work, images check historical documentation through sardonic interpretation, creating a space between text and image in which the reader/viewer may reconsider the veracity and underpinnings of official Argentine historical narratives and hegemony.
Reviews
Orientaciones transpacíficas: la modernidad mexicana y el espectro de Asia by Laura J. Torres-Rodríguez (review)
Rafael Acosta Morales
Mourning El Dorado: Literature and Extractivism in the Contemporary American Tropics by Charlotte Rogers (review)
Mark Anderson
Carmen Martín Gaite: el juego de la vida y la literatura by José Jurado Morales (review)
María Luisa Guardiola Tey
Volume 88, Number 2, Spring 2020
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ARTICLES
Sincerity, Fiction, and the Space of Lyric in the Silerio Episode of La Galatea (1585) by Miguel De Cervantes
Felipe Valencia
La Galatea (1585) by Miguel de Cervantes, as a libro de pastores that alternates the tale of fictional shepherds with the lyric verse they sincerely utter, is a book about lyric. As such, it explores a problem in lyric theory that is also touched upon in the novella "El curioso impertinente": the tension between lyric as fiction, or the mimesis of affect, and lyric as sincere outpouring, or the earnest communication of affect. In a subplot of La Galatea, the courtier Silerio disguises himself as a truhán or poet-for-hire as an allegory of an emerging kind of poet in the late sixteenth century, and in that capacity ends up praising the woman he secretly loves. This article reads La Galatea in light of key texts in lyric theory from Minturno and Torelli in the sixteenth century, to Hamburger and Smith in the twentieth, to Luján Atienza and Culler in the twenty-first.
La Historia Antigua De México De Francisco Javier Clavigero Y La Educación Indígena En Nueva España
Stephanie Rohner
Historia antigua de México (1780-1781) by Francisco Javier Clavigero represents a unique effort to systematize the pre-Columbian history of the Mexica, and to showcase their cultural achievements. This article argues that Clavigero intertwined in his historical narrative a concern about the education of natives in the viceroyalty of New Spain. In line with the pedagogical commitment of the Jesuits and the enlightened ideas of his time, he conceived education as the only means that would better allow Mexican natives to negotiate their positions within the structures of the Spanish colonial regime. Clavigero turned to pre-Columbian models to show that the Mexica had achieved the political and social welfare of their people through a solid system of domestic and public instruction. For the author, one could find examples worthy of imitation in the ancient history of Mexico.
A Edição Crítica De Alberto Caeiro/Fernando Pessoa: Elementos Para Um Estudo Da Téchne Heteronímica E De Uma Edição Hermenêutica Não-Linear
Burghard Baltrusch
Fernando Pessoa placed the brief and unfinished work of his master heteronym, Alberto Caeiro, at the center of his literary, philosophical and poetological oeuvre. Therefore, the edition and hermeneutics of Caeiro's texts are of fundamental importance to any interpretation of Pessoa's literary work as a whole. Thus, the five commented, and more or less critical editions that have been published during the last 25 years, require a critical evaluation. This study will focus primarily on the critical edition of Ivo Castro that was published in 2015, but it will also draw comparisons with the remaining four. It will be argued that all editions present incoherences with regard to their methodologies, and that they do not correspond in a satisfying manner to the challenges involved in the heteronymical process of Pessoa's creative practice. Consequently, a different method of reading and editing beyond the linear and orthotypographical genetic-critical traditions will be proposed. It will be argued that the unfinished character of Caeiro's text represents a paradigm of non-linear poetic language and poetics, which can be made extensible to the literary context of all heteronyms.
El vientre de la bestia: Crueldad, tiranía y tormento en la emblemática de los hermanos Covarrubias
José Manuel Pereiro Otero
Besides their emblematic texture, Emblemas morales (1589, 1591 and 1604), and Emblemata moralia (1601), by Juan de Horozco Covarrubias (c. 1545–1610), as well as Emblemas morales (1610), by Sebastián de Covarrubias Orozco (1539–1613), share a similar concern. Namely, certain emblems reveal an associative chain that links together the concepts of cruelty, tyranny and torture, a sequence that stresses the juxtaposition of the scope of the political to that of the juridical in any cruel act. In an implicit dialogue with political treatises like De rege et regis institutione (1599) by Juan de Mariana (1536–1624), and supported by both Greco-Latin and contemporary referents, these collections identify a particular problematic that characterizes the nexus between the 16th and 17th centuries, while participating in a transhistorical discourse that differentiates human beings from animals.
La Sagrada Familia de Max Aub: Campo cerrado, novela arquitectónica
Francisco León Rivero
Campo cerrado has been traditionally considered a realist and ethically engaged novel. This consideration may seem appropriate in light of the term galería ('gallery') with which it is characterized in the prologue and in the final pages. The term, nevertheless, allows us to open our reading of the text to a new interpretation that focuses on the architectural dimension of the work. In this essay, I first contextualize the architectural component within the urban experience (the city of Barcelona), and then approach a specific building whose presence turns out to be outstanding from an urbanistic and textual perspective: the basilica of the Sagrada Familia. Given its location in the urban landscape and the experience it evokes in the observer and main character (Rafael), the analysis of the building leads to conclusions that are applicable to the novel as a whole and contradict its initial characterization as a "gallery." Indeed, as I will demonstrate, Campo cerrado has a spatial structure buttressed by a discursive framework that is essential to a full understanding of the novel's message.
REVIEWS
Beyond Human: Vital Materialisms in the Andean Avant-Gardes by Tara Daly (review)
Cinthya Torres
Volume 88, Number 1, Winter 2020
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ARTICLES
THIS ISSUE OF HISPANIC REVIEW IS ADMIRINGLY AND AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED TO
ROMÁN DE LA CAMPA
ON THE OCCASION OF HIS RETIREMENT FROM TEACHING, 2020
A View “From the Other Side”: Román de la Campa
Mabel Morana
Publications of Roman de la Campa
Tributes to Román de la Campa
David Barreto, Isabel Díaz Alanís, Julio Sebastián Figueroa, Carolyn Fornoff, Darío Goldgel Carballo, Ignasi Gozalo-Salellas, Linda Grabner Travis, Dana Khromov, Óscar E. Montoya, Malcolm K. Read, Lucía Reyes De Deu, Nancy Roane, Giselle Román-Medina, Ignacio M. Sánchez prado, Daniella Sánchez Russo, Víctor Sierra Matute
Afecto, memoria y lugar: En las orillas del Sar, Rosalía Castro, Lestrobe
Fernando Cabo Aseguinolaza
En este artículo trataremos de mostrar la relevancia del enmarcamiento espacial y de su mediación por una comunidad emocional concreta para el análisis de En las orillas del Sar,de Rosalía Castro. Destacaremos la importancia en este sentido de un lugar particular, las Torres de Lestrobe, como punto clave en la focalización de la memoria y del afecto que articula la obra. Las implicaciones con respecto a determinados posicionamientos ideológicos y afectivos de la autora tienen asimismo, según veremos, una traslación en términos de campo literario.
Camilo Castelo Branco, autor da literatura de cordel
Carlos Nogueira
A narrativa Maria! Não Me Mates, Que Sou Tua Mãe!, publicada pelo escritor português Camilo Castelo Branco, sob anonimato, em 1848, tem seduzido até hoje ouvintes e leitores com formações e gostos muito diferentes entre si. Este texto, uma das primeiras obras em prosa do autor da célebre novela romântica Amor de Perdição (1862), surgiu em folheto de cordel. O seu grande sucesso pode avaliar-se pelas várias edições que teve logo entre 1848 e 1852. Neste artigo, procuro compreender esta obra no contexto da produção literária de Camilo e da cultura portuguesa e europeia de meados do século XIX.
El 20 de noviembre como lugar de memoria: construcciones y resignificaciones en el relato audiovisual
José Carlos Rueda Laffond, Carlota Coronado Ruiz
Pocas fechas de la reciente historia española presentan una carga de sentido tan poderosa como el 20 de noviembre. Efeméride del fallecimiento de Francisco Franco en 1975, pero también del fusilamiento de José Antonio Primo de Rivera y de la muerte de Buenaventura Durruti en 1936, ha compuesto durante décadas un potente momento de memoria. El artículo aborda, desde una perspectiva panorámica, la presencia del aniversario en el relato audiovisual, principalmente documental. El rol del 20 de noviembre como cita de memoria luctuosa, o su ligazón con la sacralización y desacralización, compondrán los ejes de interpretación, considerando que tales relatos se han implicado en procesos de construcción y reciclaje. Desde ahí se atenderá a las (re)significaciones simbólicas asociadas con las políticas de memoria donde se han situado esas producciones desde la Guerra Civil a la actualidad.
Entre alambradas y exilios: sangrías de las Españas y terapias de Vichy by José María Naharro-Calderón
Reviewied by Francie Cate-Arries
Hombres en movimiento: masculinidades españolas en los exilios y migraciones, 1939–1999 by Iker González-Allende
Reviewied by Joseba Gabilondo
Response to David Pike’s Review of Spaniards in Mauthausen in Hispanic Review
Sara J. Brenneis
Books Received
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Volume 87, Number 4, Autumn 2019
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Articles
Este artículo analiza la relación existente entre el componente bíblico-profético del Libro de Fernán Gonçález acerca de la cautividad babilónica y las profecías apocalípticas provenientes del libro de Daniel. Este vínculo alcanza su apogeo en la oración de los castellanos que, a su vez, concentra un contenido apocalíptico. El poeta, asimismo, va preparando el significado de la plegaria desde el principio de la obra mediante el planteamiento de una dinámica tipológica, que es uno de los ejes del poema. Para lograr este objetivo, se comparan las alusiones proféticas que el autor castellano hace en el poema con aquellas presentes en el Antiguo Testamento y en sus interpretaciones medievales.
"Confesar o morir": Faith and Ocular Proof in the Silk Merchant Episode (I.4) of El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha
Alani Hicks-Bartlett
The world that Don Quijote attempts to navigate in the Ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha is one in which vows are flawed, unsustainable, or completely absent, and where the dastardly effects of broken vows become both the cause and the product of violence. Chapter 4, with its incisive portrayal of the protagonist's systematic misunderstanding of promises and antipathy towards ocular proof, offers an early example of the Quijote's continual representation of the fallibility of vows and Don Quijote's attempts to overcome or overlook them. In particular, the silk merchant episode in the second half of the chapter engages questions exploring the foundation of faith. This episode dramatizes Don Quijote's problematic assumption that his chivalric code is one that all others must obey, while charting the etiology of violence associated with demanding visual evidence and exacting pledges of faith in the Quijote.
Paisana de los metales: Abstract Indigeneity in Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz's "Romance 37"
Jacob S. Neely
This essay approaches Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz's "Romance 37" from the perspective of indigenous studies, arguing that the nun portrays American birth as a discursive synecdoche to associate herself and, by extension, the New Spanish Creole class, with the riches mined in America. She equates mining, birth and material refinement with evangelization, implying that the Creoles are as fit to govern as the peninsulares because both groups are of quality stock and participate in evangelization processes. However, this rhetoric of materiality and refinement overlooks the bioethnic segregation of New Spain, meaning that the underlying argument for Creole administration may anachronistically read as a liberatory one inclusive of Amerindian peoples. By presenting successful evangelizers as the model for "indigenous" Catholic conduct, Sor Juana limits the semiotic scope of her synecdochical "América abundante" to tenants of Christian morality, explicitly excluding from this metaphysical territory those Spaniards who do not spread the word of God and implicitly excluding those who have yet to be evangelized, i.e., bio-ethnically indigenous peoples.
De Flora al Toa: Revolución, superhombre y naturaleza en Ciclón (1963) y Ociel del Toa (1965)
Roseli Rojo
El presente artículo estudia la relación hombre–naturaleza en dos documentales cubanos de la década del 60. Se contrastan Ciclón (1963), de Santiago Álvarez, y Ociel del Toa (1965), de Nicolás Guillén Landrián, para revelar dos concepciones emergentes en la Cuba revolucionaria. Pretendo demostrar que mientras Ciclón legitima una lógica de dominación de la naturaleza en sintonía con la proyección moderna, Ociel del Toa expone una síntesis entre lo humano y lo no-humano que desafía la visión dominante en el Estado cubano. Para corroborar esta tesis, me apoyo en las ideas de Boaventura de Sousa y Walter Mignolo sobre las epistemologías del Sur y el sistema mundial moderno/colonial, respectivamente. Además, retomo el concepto de "superhombre" delineado por Bolívar Echeverría.
Review
Cultures of the Fragment: Uses of the Iberian Manuscript, 1100–1600 by Heather Bamford (review)
Scotland Long
Books Received