New Readings of Silvina Ocampo. Beyond Fantasy ed. by Patricia N. Klingenberg, and Fernanda Zullo-Ruiz

Abstract

Reviewed by: New Readings of Silvina Ocampo. Beyond Fantasy ed. by Patricia N. Klingenberg, and Fernanda Zullo-Ruiz Gonzalo Montero Klingenberg, Patricia N., and Zullo-Ruiz, Fernanda, editors. New Readings of Silvina Ocampo. Beyond Fantasy. Woodbridge, Suffolk: Tamesis, 2016. 245 pp. ISBN: 978-18-5566-308-4. New Readings of Silvina Ocampo. Beyond Fantasy, edited by Patricia Klingenberg and Fernanda Zullo-Ruiz is the result of a long-term collaboration between several scholars that started in a conference held in Buenos Aires in 2003. This volume aims to contribute to our understanding of the relevance of the Argentine writer Silvina Ocampo (1903–1993), and to go beyond oversimplifications of her literature. By reading her figure "not as Bioy's wife, Borges's friend, or Victoria's sister, but as one of the greatest Argentine writes of the twentieth century" (15), the editors and contributors tried to challenge certain stereotypes when talking about Ocampo's literary production. These 'new readings' expand the critical tools to read her works, and put together some of the canonical critical readings of the author. As Klingenberg and Zullo-Ruiz say in the introduction to this volume, "[w]e have tried here to move beyond the most often-studied of her stories, and also to recognize and engage the different voices that have emerged regarding Ocampo's work" (9). In Chapter 1, Klingenberg maps the main recent contributions to Ocampo's scholarship. Despite the increasing interest in her writing, the reception of her work is uneven in Latin America: "in some quarters Silvina Ocampo is now considered a canonical writer, while in others she remains virtually unknown" (17). Klingenberg aims "to provide a history of recent criticism on the author which will bring this volume's reader up to date" (17). This chapter might be particularly helpful for scholars interested in getting a broad picture of Ocampo's critical reception, from the late 1990s to the present. The following chapters study different aspects of Ocampo's work, from diverse perspectives and critical approaches, but also assuming different forms of writing: some of them are strictly academic, others are personal accounts (Ulla, Agosín). In Chapter 2, Andrea Ostrov analyzes the problem of literary representation in Autobiografía de Irene, a collection of short stories published in 1948. Ostrov tries to "interrogate the place that writing acquires in the author's poetics, not just as a signifying structure but also as an object of reflection, as itself a theme or pretext for [End Page 172] fiction" (41). Topics such as doubles, metamorphosis, and transformations of the characters are also forms of meta-literary reflections in these stories, according to Ostrov. In Chapter 3, Judith Podlubne studies the late stage of the literary magazine Sur in the 1960s. Podlubne reads closely a diverse set of personal documents of the members, such as letters and diary entries, in order to describe the tensions and debates within the inner circle of Sur, and how these affected Ocampo's writing. Chapter 4 focuses in the topic of cruelty in her fiction. Ashley Hope Pérez argues that "the challenge of cruelty in Ocampo's fiction resides as much in how it becomes present to readers as it does in the stories' thematic content" (77). Instead of understanding cruelty as part of the plot of the stories, Pérez focuses on the way in which the literary form produces moments of unsettlement among the readers. In Chapter 5, Giulia Poggi analyzes the last book by Ocampo, Cornelia frente al espejo (1988). Poggi focuses her analysis on the ways in which Ocampo incorporates fairy tales motifs in this book. By revisiting some traditional motifs, Ocampo is not just adapting them in a contemporary setting, but also generating a fragmentary narrative structure in which different elements of the story modify each other. Chapter 6 is not a conventional academic study, but a personal account of the writer Noemí Ulla, in which she remembers her friendship with Ocampo, intertwining personal memories with critical analysis of specific poems by Ocampo. In Chapter 7, Fiona J. Mackintosh studies the classical references in Ocampo's poetry. Mackintosh's is one of the few contributors to the volume that...