(review)

Abstract

MLRy 100.3, 2005 851 as ascribe for subscribe, several instances ofprinciple forprincipal, and elementary for elemental. Why, one wonders, in a study which is clearly aimed at a readership of the initiated, was the Spanish translated at all? University of Sheffield Paul Jordan Hacia una poetica de la mirada: Mario Vargas Llosa,Juan Marse, Elena Garro, Juan Goytisolo. By Maria Silvina Persino. Buenos Aires: Corregidor. 1999. 189 pp. $15. ISBN 950-05-1244-0. Over the past ten to fifteenyears, humanities departments in the Anglo-American academy have experienced a gradual shiftin emphasis, and traditional disciplines, such as English and Modern Languages, that were once squarely literary have recently widened their purview. Now the novel, poetry, and drama vie to capture interest alongside a wealth of visual encoded artefacts and practice such as film,photography, and art. Literary study has not, however, been immune to what W J. T. Mitchell has called the 'visual turn' (Picture Theory (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994)) and a growing corpus of critical work now exists devoted to probing the interrelationships between the visual and the textual. In the introduction to Hacia una poetica de la mirada, Maria Silvina Persino locates her text as part of this tendency, citing the work of Mitchell himself, Mieke Bal, Claude Gandelman, and Martin Jay as part of a larger project concerned to explore similar verbal/visual intersections. Silvina Persino's text, however, focuses on a range of Hispanic authors whose work she perceives to privilege questions ofvision and visuality. Thus her study explores the visual images that are intercalated in Mario Vargas Llosa's erotic novela El elogio de la madrastra (1988); the voyeuristic gaze in Juan Marse's Si te dicen que cai (1980); questions of the cinematic and photographic gaze in Elena Garro's Testimonios sobre Mariana (1981), Reencuentros de personajes (1982), and Andamos huyendo a Lola (1980); and what she terms the interior gaze in Juan Goytisolo's Senas de identidad (1988). Despite her central premiss that the visual is privileged in each of her chosen texts, Silvina Persino's study is not, however, concerned with the specificity of visuality within the Hispanic world and she explicitly eschews both national and regional frameworks of analysis. Rather, her chosen texts and their treatment of the visual are part of what she terms 'el caracter universal de las configuraciones visuales' (P- 13). The detailed textual analysis that makes up the four chapters follows a similar format throughout the volume. Each opens with a brief overview of the text/s in question, a survey of the critical literature that has appeared to date, followed by Silvina Persino's own visually oriented analysis. Sometimes, as in the case of the chapter on Elogio de la madrastra, the survey material is absolutely germane to the argument, where the author argues that Vargas Llosa's text is a parody of the erotic genre. At other points, however, the survey material felt a little heavy-handed. So, forexample, in the chapter on Garro Silvina Persino attempts to extract the Mexican woman writer from the biographical criticism and periodizationof her work. But was it really necessary to devote four pages to this task before getting to the far more interesting textual analysis? In fact this, for me, would be a major question mark about Hacia una poetica de la mirada. While much of the author's textual analysis is both original and insightful? particularly where she draws parallels between looking at relations within the texts themselves and the reader's role in the visual processes at play?the book would have benefited from a lighter, more subtle critical touch. At times it felt as if there was critical work going on in the footnotes that might have been better placed in 852 Reviews the main body of the text itself. This phenomenon was particularly noticeable in the introduction, which perhaps needed to contextualize and elaborate on the debates around the 'visual turn', and also to provide a clearer definition of the volume's methodology. Symptomatic of this was SilvinaPersino's definition of the 'poetica' of the volume's title: 'El termino "poetico" debe ser entendido aqui como una estrategia...