Creo Que Research Articles

Spanglish: From olla podrida to tasty menudo y más

ABSTRACT For many Spanish speakers, Spanglish is perceived as a bastardized form of Spanish that does not count as “real” Spanish. This view rests on the assumption that there is a “real” Spanish, which operates by a set of grammatical, lexical and morphological rules such that when bilingual speakers mix into these rules elements that belong to English, they produce “ill-formed” expressions like “Mamá, púshame en el columpio” and “Porque no me llamas pa’ tras,” and macaronic languaging like “Creo que she’s not wachando la movie.” In this paper, I argue that this portrayal of Spanglish is based on prescriptive, deficit models that ignore socio-cultural transborder realities of Spanish and English and bilingual language users in contact. Drawing on examples from bilingual children’s literature, bilingual (hybrid) discourse, and bilingual cultural models, I show that Spanglish is not only linguistically well-formed, but also a genuine reflection of bilingual transborder identity affiliations for many Spanglish users living along the US-Mexican regions of the United States. Based on the analyses of the examples, I present the case that serious study of Spanglish within bilingual communities needs to place it within the socio-cultural, transborder contexts that contribute to its development and use.

The influence of first and second language on the acquisition of pragmatic markers in Spanish

This paper reports on an experimental study of the use of two Spanish markers of epistemic modality and evidentiality, creo que ‘I believe that’ and pienso que ‘I think that’, by native speakers, and by Dutch and German learners of Spanish. We found a clear preference for creo que among the native speakers of Spanish, but with differences between the main varieties of the language. For Dutch and German learners the preference for creo que was significantly weaker, and for beginning learners of Spanish it was significantly weaker than for advanced learners. While for the Dutch learners of Spanish this pattern reflects the preference for I think over I believe in their L1, the preference that the German-speaking learners have for creo que can be seen as evidence for a general tendency noticed in the literature, namely the interference of an L2 (in this case English) instead of the L1 (in this case German) in L3 performance (in this case Spanish).

Perspectival factors and pro-drop: A corpus study of speaker/addressee pronouns with creer ‘think/ believe’ and saber ‘know’ in spoken Spanish

This paper examines overt and covert speaker/addressee pronouns with the cognitive verbs creer ‘think/believe’ and saber ‘know’ in a corpus of spoken peninsular Spanish – the Madrid and Alcalá samples of PRESEEA (2014– ) – with a focus on 1st person singular (yo) creo que ‘(I) think that’. Departing from the observation made in the literature that overt pronouns are highly frequent with creer and that topic shift cannot account for all of them, it will be argued that perspectival factors related to evidentiality/epistemicity and subjectivity influence overt pronoun realization. A corpus study was conducted to investigate whether (i) [person] and [polarity] and (ii) the type of complement affect overt pronoun realization with the cognitive verbs creer and saber. The results indicate that the type of belief expressed in the embedded clause should be taken into account, as well as person and polarity. The ultimate trigger for phonetic realization of speaker/addressee pronouns will be argued to be the notion of contrast: cognitive verbs whose embedded complement encodes evaluations and non-visual, abstract information have high frequencies of overt pronoun realization because these contexts favor the evoking of alternative perspective holders. Overt pronouns will be analyzed as the result of a [+contrast] feature which is assigned to the specifier of a functional category encoding perspective in the split IP.

McCrack: McOndo, El Crack Y Los Destinos De La Literatura Latinoamericana ed. by Brescia Pablo and Oswaldo Estrada

Reviewed by: McCrack: McOndo, El Crack Y Los Destinos De La Literatura Latinoamericana ed. by Brescia Pablo and Oswaldo Estrada MartÍn Camps Brescia, Pablo, and Oswaldo Estrada, editors. McCrack: McOndo, el Crack y los destinos de la literatura latinoamericana. Albatros Ediciones, 2018. 270 pp. ISBN: 978- 84-7274-359-5. The sixteen essays of this anthology, plus one interview, are divided into four parts to analyze the short stories compiled by Chileans Sergio Gómez and Alberto Fuguet in 1994, and the Mexican "Crack" group. McOndo became one of the major [End Page 146] anthologies that emerged after the Latin American Boom. The editors, Pablo Brescia and Oswaldo Estrada, use "McCrack" to include the members of the Crack in Mexico formed by Ricardo Chávez Castañeda, the late Ignacio Padilla, Pedro Angel Palou, Jorge Volpi, and Eloy Urroz who stormed the literary scene with a manifesto. Mcondistas wanted to escape the long shadow of the Boom writers and, as they wrote in their introduction, address their dilemmas that were between Windows 95 or Macintosh rather than the pen or the rifle. Crack writers reacted to the fatigue brought on by the so much attention paid to "magical realism" that had turned into "magiquismo trágico" as Ignacio Padilla described it. The first section offers the views of writers in regards to these movements. Edmundo Paz Soldán reflects twenty years after the McOndo anthology launched conveniently in a McDonald's restaurant in Santiago. For him the anthology was trying to combat a stereotype of Latin American fiction while imposing another based on urban settings and the omnipresence of media and MTV in those years. He says "La utopía estaba en el prólogo, no en los cuentos" (24). Paz-Soldán also mentions how the anthology Se habla español came about, with 36 writers included and involving Latino authors such as Junot Díaz, Ernesto Quiñonez and Silvana Paternostro. In his essay, Pedro Angel Palou, a member himself of the Crack, mentions the initial disregard by critics. One of them said, for example, that because the novels were published as a package, he would not review them. Salvador Elizondo, when asked about the movement, responded: "No creo que esos muchachos fumen Crack, se ven muy fresas." Guillermo Fadanelli remarks: "más bien será el grupo del frac." He attests that the movement was an opening to a "renovado cosmopolitismo" (30), and that they were not looking to destroy the Boom but to continue it. In Naief Yehya's article he references the magazine Moho, that appeared in a moment when all literary expressions that seemed new were considered part of "La Onda," a literary movement that in the eighties had passed its prime. With Guillermo Fadanelli's collaboration they wanted to move away from the "literature that they were condemned to read" (47). Yehya moved to New York in the 90s and kept in touch with Mexico collaborating on the newspaper La Jornada, via internet. Technology and culture had been one of his areas of expertise, and his many articles relating to this topic are illuminating. He shares an anecdote: that the news articles he would send to the newspaper by email were followed by a request to send them again by fax, not because they did not receive the email, but because they did not know how to open the attachments in the early internet era. In Cristina Rivera Garza's article, she talks about the concept of chi-ixi or in between entities, and the rise of Creative Writing programs in Spanish in the US; she says "el español cruza una de las fronteras más dramáticas y poderosas de nuestro mundo globalizado sobre los hombros y en las bocas de los migrantes indocumentados" (53). The second part of the book deals with a cartography of movements. Eduardo Becerra's essay draws a map of novels based on themes and not on group designations or by decades; he mentions that for Jorge Volpi, "Bolaño construyó el último discurso épico del continente y de su historia" (63). Jorge Fornet refers to new writers and the emphasis placed on their young age...

Mood variation after expressions of uncertainty in Spanish

AbstractAccording to prescriptive grammars of Spanish, subordinate clauses after expressions of uncertainty require the subjunctive when introduced by the complementizerque‘that’ (e. g.,No creo que venga (S). ‘I don’t believe that he’ll come.’) but require the indicative when introduced by the complementizersi‘if/whether’ (e. g.,No sé si viene (I). ‘I don’t know if he’ll come.’). The use of these moods in actual speech, however, is highly variable. Using a database of conversational Spanish from 10 cities in Latin America and Spain, 428 tokens of subjunctive and indicative mood use were examined according to the following linguistic and social factors – subject agreement, intervening material, frequency of the subordinate verb, age, sex, and education level. Of these variables, only intervening material is statistically significant in the conditioning of mood variation. The use of the subjunctive is preferred after the complementizerquewhen there is no intervening material separating it from the subordinate verb. In order to further explore possible interactions between individual factors, a Joint Multiple Correspondence Analysis using R was conducted. Results from this exploratory analysis suggest that the use of the subjunctive correlates with young, male, and highly educated speakers whereas the indicative correlates with older, female, and less educated speakers. The variable use of mood after expressions of uncertainty in Spanish may be socially motivated, as these results suggest. As such, the impact of social variables on mood variation should be explored in future studies.

Subjunctive and subject pronoun realization: a study of "no creo que"

Subjunctive mood in complement clauses is licensed under selection from certain predicates or under the scope of a modal or negation. In contexts where mood choice varies, such as the complement of a negated epistemic verb no creer, it introduces a contrast in interpretation. The subjunctive is thought to contribute to a shift in the modal anchoring of the embedded clause, and is consequently interpreted as indicative of a dissociation between the epistemic models of the speaker and the subject. We provide evidence that these uses also interact with pragmatic context. Given independent claims that 1) the overt realization of first person subject pronouns is contrastive and 2) it generally serves to anchor discourse to the speaker’s perspective and 3) overt use is particularly frequent with epistemic verbs, we examined the interaction between negation, first person subject pronoun realization, and mood of the dependent clause for the verb creer. An analysis of oral speech from the Proyecto de Habla Culta revealed that for negative sentences (no creo que), yo is overtly realized more frequently for cases with exceptional indicative dependents than for those with canonical subjunctive dependents; there was no association with mood for affirmative uses of creer. These results support analyses where negation has specific scope over the contrastive subject, rather than over the epistemic clause. As a consequence, the matrix proposition remains an assertion and use of indicative complements is licensed.

Juan de Mena’s El Laberinto de Fortuna , Petrarch’s Africa , the Scipcio/Caesar Controversy

Juan de Mena’s El Laberinto de Fortuna, Petrarch’s Africa, the Scipcio/Caesar Controversy Frank Domínguez Juan de Mena is widely regarded as one of the poets responsible for introducing the Italian Renaissance to Castilian writers.1 Nevertheless, as most critics have remarked, Mena only partially assimilates the Renaissance aesthetic, making him, at most, its harbinger. While basically agreeing with this assessment, this paper posits closer ties between Mena and the work of humanists in Florence and Ferrara by examining El Laberinto de Fortuna [End Page 137] (1454), Mena’s famous allegorical epic poem, for traces of one of the greatest controversies of its time: whether one should emulate Scipio or Caesar.2 Juan de Mena begins El Laberinto de Fortuna, with three stanzas: A brief dedication to the King, Juan II (stanza 1: “Al muy prepotente don Juan el segundo”), a general complaint about the fate of men (stanza 2: “Tus casos fallaces, Fortuna, cantamos,”),3 and an appeal to the muse of epic poetry for inspiration (stanza 3: “Tú, Callíope, me sey favorable”). It is only in the fourth stanza that he introduces one of the major themes of the poem, when he asks why the Cid and the “agenores” are regarded differently in spite of their comparable achievements:4 Las Trezientas 4 ¶ Como no creo que fueffen menoresque los africanos los hechos del cid.ny que ferozes menos enla lidentraffen los nueftros que los agenores.Las grandes hazañas de nueftros mayores,la mucha conftancia de quien los mas amayaze en tinieblas dormida fu fama,dañada de oluido por falta de auctores.5 [End Page 138] Mena’s comparisons, as usual, are intentionally unclear. While “africanos” seems to be a common adjective that designates descent from a region, who are the “agenores”? The late fifteenth-century editor of Las Trezientas, Hernán Núñez, wondered whether the word really meant “ajenos,” because he considered that it might be a case of epenthesis (i.e. an addition to a word) to fulfill the requirements of meter.6 But Mena, who often plays with the ambiguity occasioned by sound, does not need to do so in this case. As both ancient and modern editors of El Laberinto have observed, “agenores” means “the Thebans,” because Thebes was founded by Cadmus, the son of King Agenor of Phoenicia, an “Agenorides”.7 The word therefore means the people of the ancient kingdom of Thebes and, metaphorically, all of the people of North Africa.8 But is this what Mena is saying? Núñez himself answers the question by stating in a later gloss to the stanza: “Puéde fe entender que no fueron menores los hechos del cid ruydiaz que los de Annibal africano, … o …, que no fueron menores que los hechos [End Page 139] de los dos Scipiones africanos, delos quales el primero venció en africa a Anníbal, et hizo tributaria alos romanos la ciudad de Carthago, y el fegundo, nieto del primero por adopción, la deftruyó del todo” (Las Trezientas 1499, 4b).9 Verses 4a-4c therefore compare the deeds of the Cid to the deeds of the Scipiones—who received the agnomen “africanos” by right of conquest but were not really Africans—while “los agenores” are the foes of “los nuestros” and refers to the African origins of the enemies of both men. The verses claim that the reputation of Roman Scipiones, who defeated African Carthage, is greater than the reputation of the Cid, who vanquished an equally dangerous and equally African invader during the Reconquest. The reason for the comparison, however, is to ask an implied question: Why this difference? Mena’s answer is immediate: Although the Cid’s deeds are known—because Mena was able to refer to them—El Cid has not been memorialized by writers worthy of being called “auctores”. As a result, his fame lies “en tinieblas”.10 The stanza comments on the ability of writers, in particular epic poets, to confer fame on heroes like the Scipios. Because Spain has not had such...

Raphael and Spanish Popular Song: A Master Entertainer and/or Music for Maids

Raphael and Spanish Popular Song: A Master Entertainer and/or Music for Maids1 Duncan Wheeler (bio) Raphael, a global multimedia superstar, began his professional singing career in 1960 and has subsequently taken the lead role in numerous cinematic star vehicles, hosted his own television shows and starred in the Spanish version of the Jekyll and Hyde stage musical. His initial rise to fame was inextricably linked with his ability to simultaneously embody tradition and modernity in his public persona, music and performance style. He remains a household name in Spain and his television specials on Christmas Eve have become as traditional and commented upon as the King’s address to the nation. Although Raphael is undeniably an institution at home, he is too contested a figure to acquire the status of a national treasure. In the words of Luz Sánchez-Mellado: Pruebe a decir estas frases en público. Yo soy aquél. Qué sabe nadie. En carne viva. Escándalo. Seguro que alguien las completa con una estrofa sepultada en su inconsciente. Como la magdalena de Proust. Como el perro de Pavlov. Cada una de las 300 canciones del repertorio de Raphael desencadena una respuesta automática en el imaginario de tres generaciones de españoles. Con su nombre pasa igual. ¿Raphael? “Un artistazo.” “Un histrión.” “Un facha.” “El precursor del glam.” “Una estrella.” “Amanerado.” “Único.” La reacción espontánea de un puñado de encuestados lo constata. Todos tienen una opinión sobre él. (52) [End Page 11] My intention in this article is to contextuy intention in this article is to contextualise and explain these complex and often contradictory responses which, I will argue, stem largely from the fact that Raphael embodies a form of commoditised mass culture which came to the fore in Spain during the 1960s when, in Tatjana Pavlović’s memorable phrase, the Franco “regime’s self-justification ceased to be metaphysical and became more frankly material” (1). It is designed to be read as a socio-historical companion piece to the first academic study dedicated to Raphael in which I locate him, both culturally and aesthetically, within the nascent field of Spanish popular music studies (Wheeler). Especially following his marriage to aristocrat Natalia Figueroa in 1972, Raphael had close personal and political ties with the Francoist elite and he provides a particularly blatant example of how celebrities courted and were courted by the dictatorial regime. In interviews as in his lyrics, he sought to avoid political commentary but, when pushed, he made his sentiments if not his words clear: ¿Si creo que existen aquí problemas políticos? ¡Ahí, sí que me has dado en la médula: de eso sí que no entiendo nada! Y no es pose: soy apolítico por completo, por completo. No sé qué es socialismo, no sé qué es . . . ¿qué más cosas hay? . . . pues comunismo . . . ¿qué más cosas hay?, hay más cosas . . . democracia y rinosincracia, ¡ja, ja, ja! Te juro que no entiendo nada. Ni siquiera sé lo que quieren decir estas palabras . . . Yo admiro y adoro con locura al Generalísimo Franco, le quiero muchísimo, con amor profundo. Me produjo un respeto imponente . . . Ahora, si de pronto, viene el rey Juan Carlos o . . . y viene él y se porta tal como Franco, para mí merecerá los mismos respetos, igual como se merecía mis respetos por lo bien que se ha portado con el pueblo americano Kennedy, ¿me entiendes? (Raphael cited in Porcel, “Raphael” 23) During the 1960s and early 1970s, this led many to assume that he was an opportunist whose fame would be transitory. Raphael is a fascinating case-study in that he helps contextualise the distrust of popular culture in the Spanish academy, an unsatisfactory state of affairs of which he is both a victim and perpetrator. An (in)conspicuous absence of scholarly attention is, I will suggest, symptomatic of a broader tendency characterised by Jo Labanyi in the following terms: “critical writing on modern Spanish culture, by largely limiting itself to the study of ‘high culture’ (even when the texts studied are non-canonical), has systematically made invisible—ghostly—whole areas of culture which are...

Ca�n (review)

Reviewed by: Caín María Fernández-Babineaux Saramago, José . Caín. Trans. Pilar del Río. Lima: Santillana, 2009. Pp. 189. ISBN 785458843-0. José Saramago (1922-2010) was a Portuguese novelist, playwright, journalist, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1998. Most of Saramago's novels depict allegories of human nature, often dealing with fantastic alternative worlds. Saramago explores throughout his work the fragility of human condition, the issue of identity and the meaning of life. In his latest novel, Caín, Saramago rewrites the biblical story of Cain and Abel. As with the publication of The Gospel According to Jesus Christ (1991), Saramago's Caín has aroused considerable controversy in Portugal since its publication in November, 2009. Members of Portugal's Catholic Church and community found Saramago's representation of God and the biblical characters offensive and sacrilegious. The novel is divided into twelve chapters. Caín's heterodiegetic narrator holds a burlesque and ironic tone. In chapter nine, this posture is patent; Cain prevents the sacrifice of Isaac, as commanded by God to prove Abraham's faith. The narrator satirizes both the action of Abraham and God's irrational and brutal request: "El lector ha leído bien, el señor ordenó a abraham (sic) que le sacrificase a su propio hijo . . . como quien pide un vaso de agua. . . . Lo lógico, lo natural, simplemente humano hubiera sido que abraham (sic) mandase al señor a la mierda, pero no fue así" (88). Saramago's distinctive and experimental style is present in Caín with its extremely long sentences and scarce punctuation marks. Many of his paragraphs also run several pages without pause. Proper nouns are generally not capitalized, minimizing in this case the importance culture has bestowed upon these nouns. Chapters 1 and 2 retell the story of Adam and Eve's expulsion from the Garden of Eden, whose jocose description as "desnuditos, en pelota viva" (15) removes the solemnity from the original biblical version. After the eviction, Adam and Eve hide in a cave guarded by Azael. The archangel disobeys God, saving the couple from starvation, and helping them flee God's cruel mandate. Chapters 3 and 4 describe the story of the brothers Cain and Abel. Saramago's representation of Cain opposes Cain's traditional view as a despicable fratricide. After Abel's murder by Cain's hands, the latter blames God by saying: "Cómo tú fuiste libre para dejar que matara a abel (sic) cuando estaba en tus manos evitarlo" (39). After this episode, Cain begins a journey to discover his place in the biblical history/story. Saramago's Cain resembles Hermann Hesse's representation of the same character. In Damian (1919), Cain is depicted as brave and powerful; and his visible forehead mark, as a badge of courage instead of as a mark of damnation. As portrayed in Damian, Saramago's Cain is depicted as a peon in God's humanity and perverse chess game. Chapter 5 describes Cain's sexual encounter with Lilith, the queen of "nod". According to the apocryphal book of Genesis, Lilith was the first woman created by God. However, Lilith rejects the submissive position that God assigns her. The myth recounts that Lilith was turned into the snake that later successfully tempts Eve. Lilith in Saramago's Cain, is represented as a powerful, independent and sexually voracious woman: Eve's antithesis. Chapters 6 through 9 rewrite three biblical episodes with Cain as a protagonist and judge of the events. In chapter 10, the oscillation of time and space takes Cain back to his beloved Lilith. Cain meets Enoch, their son, and stays briefly at the palace only to continue his existential [End Page 557] journey in search of answers: "Sí, creo que así será, si nací para vivir algo diferente, tengo que saber qué y para qué" (144). In the last two chapters, Cain believes that he has gained the knowledge he was seeking. Cain is the only one saved in Noah's ark. He confronts God again, who acknowledges his liaison with Satan and affirms that he gives Satan an opportunity every time something bad happens, "para que se entretenga" (168). Cain...

Sex And The Citizen: Barbies And Beauty Queens In The Age Of Evo Morales1

In this famous image (figure 1) of the ‘discovery’ of America by Theodor Galle in 1580, the European Amerigo Vespucci, erect and holding the tools of rational science (an astrolabe) and his religio...

Rojas's "Celestina and Claudina": In Search of a Witch

SINCE 1963, Peter E. Russell's pivotal study on the centrality of magic in the Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea has enabled scholars to analyze how Fernando de Rojas' uses magic.1 Testimony to the importance of Russell's study surfaces in three recent studies treating magic in Celestina-- Dorothy Severin's (1993 and 1995 [revised 1997]), Patrizia Botta's (1994), and Olga Lucia Valbuena's (1994)-as all three take note of Russell's work.2 The springboard for this study, however, is an earlier one, The Evolution of the Go-Between in Spanish Literature through the Sixteenth Century (1966),3 by Michael J. Ruggerio who purports to define witch, sorceress and demoniac precisely, thereby giving and Celestina, as a major character creation, a more defined and definite form than that which critics have given them to date (1). Rojas' main innovation to the character of the alcahueta, asserts Ruggerio, is the addition of witchcraft: Celestina in her turn has established a lasting tradition in which the alcahueta and witch are irremediably joined (3).4 In brief, using reliable authorities (Rossell Hope Robbins, Henry Charles Lea, Antonio de Torquemada, and Fray Martin de Castanega), Ruggerio distills a definition inconsistent with his presuppositions and so discards it to assert that is a witch. He does not examine Celestina's idiolect. Ruggerio's conclusion motivated Russell, in a revised version of his original analysis, to observe: Creo que no tiene razon Ruggerio al decir (p. 53) que se llama a no solo 'hechicera' sino tambien `bruja.' La unica mencionada en el texto es Dona Claudina y la distincion puede ser importante (272n14).5 The distinction is important, if for no other reason, because Rojas maintains it. This study proposes that for Rojas, in consonance with prevailing, popular literature, the terms bruja and hechicera signaled substantially separate entities, whereas in official literature, manuals on witchcraft written by and for professionals-jurisconsults, canonists, theologians, judges, etc.-, the distinction was blurred and, in fact, obliterated. The evidence in Celestina-that Rojas used only the term hechicera to refer to his hag, although he was remarkably aware of the term bruja,-suggests deliberateness. This view may not find favor today as consulting a modern English or Spanish dictionary will attest that neither English nor Spanish differentiates the two entities. Today, then, the terms are essentially synonymous. Rojas, and a portion of his cultural milieu, as this examination contends, did not hold this perspective.6 Ruggerio's approach to the problem remains pertinent. Hence, besides examining modern-day authorities and authorities contemporaneous to Rojas, this analysis will consider Rojas' own usage. For sake of concision, concerning modern-day authorities, Jeffrey Burton Russell's observations in Witchcraft in the Middle Ages will suffice as they clarify the issue in accordance with the next group of sources examined. This group, geographically and temporally closer to Rojas, again uses Ruggerio's selection as a starting point. To Antonio de Torquemada's Jardin de flores curiosas and Fray Martin de Castanega's Tratado de las supersticiones y hechicerias, the former popular literature and the latter official, the following may be added: official works-Malleus Maleficarum (c. 1487) by Henry Kramer and James Sprenger, Pedro Ciruelo's Reprouacion de las supersticiones y hechizerias (1530), Jean Bodin's De la Demonomanie des Sorciers (1580), and finally, George Gyfford's A Discourse of the Subtill Practises of Deuilles by Witches and Sorcerers (1587); popular works-Sebastian de Covarrubias' Tesoro de la lengua castellana o espanola, and Cervantes' Coloquio de los perros. Finally, a brief discussion of pact considers two manifestations of the same hag who resemble Celestina, one found in don Juan Manuel's Conde Lucanor and the other in the anonymous Esopete ystoriado. …

Father White in the Torrid Zone

FATHER WHITE IN THE TORRID ZONE/ Kris Lackey ONE BY ONE the lepers' tongues slithered for the Host. Father Lawrence White looked down upon the surfacing faces—one without a nose, one without ears, one with a whorled cavity in the cheek. He raised each wafer with an austere flourish, brought it near the suppticant's tongue and then, Uke a deft croupier, tossed it in. He had practiced this shot with poker chips and a plastic cup in his Com-fort Inn room in Freret, Louisiana, the night before he assumed his duties at the Gautreaux Hansen's Disease Center. By the time he had stepped off the plane in New Orleans, Father White knew plenty about Hansen's disease, including the facts that it was no longer caUed "leprosy" by potite persons and that it was rarely spread by casual contact in sanitary environments. But aU the science in Christendom could not dispel the images branded on his imagination: filthy, gaping, cave-dwelling specters lifting their gaUed limbs to an unblemished Jesus. There were no chUdren in Gautreaux. Forced incarceration of lepers had ceased decades before. AU the remaining patients were elderly, long cured or in remission. Father White missed chUdren, but he did not miss them in the way some had likely thought he would when he was sent to a place where there were none. The last child he had touched was perhaps the last chtid he would ever touch. Father White read difficult books. He did not own a television set. When he had bent to tuck in tittle Tim Knudsen's shirttaU, both of them shivering in the foyer of St. Jude's in Fausse Cascade, Michigan, he was ignorant of the nation's latest hysteria. Mrs. WaUy Vloedmann, gusting into the church door with an Alberta clipper at her back, owned three television sets. "But Tm a healthy heterosexual man!" Father White wanted to shout in the foyer of St. Jude's, and on many occasions after that. "I have impure thoughts about women!" In fact, two days before he was caught with his innocent hand down Timmy's pants, he had heard the confession of a young woman who unleashed a pack of impure thoughts. Her name was Simone Caquelin; her voice he knew perfectly by its fickle pitch and girlish hoarseness. What her sins were, he had forgotten. He remembered wiping his wet palms again and again on his black trousers, tugging at his coUar for air, clearing his throat The Missouri Review · 177 and next day going to a strange priest in Menominee to confess himself. He had been sent to the lepers for the wrong sin. "Padre," whispered a short, one-armed Puerto Rican man after the dismissal and blessing, "Yo creo que . . . Excuse me, I think the prisoners are planning to steal Henry from the lagoon." "Henry?" "Our alUgator." Father White stared at him, then saw him. "Tm sorry?" "I think the prisoners plan to steal Henry and seU him to the sausage man. He is, Uke, our pet, our mascot. We feed him." Several other parishioners , overhearing Faustino, gathered around him and Father White. "See?" Faustino thrust his stump forward with counterfeit indignation . The others rolled their eyes, but when Father White grimaced, they tittered. "Can you help us stop them?" "Have you told the warden?" "Not those prisoners, the other prisoners. The ones from the parish." "This parish?" "No," piped a small, intense, white-haired woman from her adult's tricycle. "The other parish. St. Swithins Parish." "I think they're going to do it today!" said Faustino. "On Sunday?" asked Father White. "Big DUI litter-detaU day," said the woman. "I see," said the priest, who did not. "Whom should I inform about this plot?" "The parish deputy," said Eleanor from her hike. "The stout feUow sleeping in the orange truck by the helipad." Father White began dimly to perceive the circles of his new heU. The patients languished in one circle, the state minimum security convicts in another, the community service prisoners in a third. And he had one aU to himself. "Father Discus!" shouted Eleanor archly. The priest looked up. After a beat...

Spanish Golden Age Drama. An Annotated Bibliography of United States Doctoral Dissertations, 1899-1992, with a Supplement of Non-United States Dissertations (review)

226BCom, Vol. 52, No. 1 (2000) Creo que estos casos muestran el interés del traductor por mantener de forma continua la comprensibAidad de la obra. Me he referido repetidamente al espectador en lugar de al lector, porque éste es un producto claramente destinado a la puesta en escena. Posiblemente el lector especiafista en la comedia no se sienta del todo conforme con la traducción y la falta de notas expUcativas, pero no es ésta la Aitención de WAUam OUver. Si tenemos en cuenta las dAicultades que presenta para el púbüco nativo la comprensión de una obra de teatro de esta época—especialmente para espectadores no acostumbrados ya al verso—la mejor opción es la de OUver, especialmente si se quiere avivar el interés por la comedia entre el púb üco anglòfono. David Gómez Torres Univiversiry ofWisconsin, Oshkosh Reynolds, John J., and Szüvia E. Szmuk. Spanish Golden Age Drama An Annotated Bûoliography of United States Doctoral Dissertations, 1899-1992, wüh a Supplement ofNonUnited States Dissertations. New York: MLA, 1998. Hardcover . 573 pp. Rare is the academic book that both deUghts and instructs, as Cervantes might have said had he Uved in our time. John J. Reynolds and SzAVia E. Szmuk have produced one such volume in their informative and fascAiating bibUography of U.S. dissertations on the comedia a book that wAl prove to be of considerable value to the research community in our field and reveals the need to undertake simüar projects in others. The book is, first and foremost, a detaAed and comprehensive Usting of 853 dissertations on or related to Golden Age Drama written in the United States between 1899 and 1992 (many Ustings actuaUy are as recent as 1997), plus a supplement of 616 dissertations from Canada and Western Europe from 1817 to 1992. FoUowAig the precise and user-friendly Reviews227 bibUographical format the authors have estabUshed as an industry standard Ai the acclaimed Bulletin of the Comediantes annual bibUography, the present volume is carefuUy organized by category, begAining with broader studies about the Golden Age as a period, on theatre and drama in general, and then alphabeticaUy by dramatist, Aicluding a few thematic categories that transcend AidMdual playwrights, such as the Don Juan theme, Catalan theatre, and others. (A note of disclaimer: the reader should be advised that I coUaborate with Dr. Szmuk on the BCom bibUography and have personal knowledge of her exacting standards of detaA and thoroughness, which, naturaUy , apply to this volume as weU). The book is also a gold mine of academic genealogy, revealAig an intricate web of scholarly relationships quite befitting its "whodunit" advertising campaign, as seen in this journal, among others. WhAe each entry identifies the usual suspects (author, title, number of pages, institution, date of degree, and so on), the authors also include the director, the reference source that led them to the dissertation, a citation of pubUshed versions of the study, an abstract, and a very helpful Ust of resultant pubücations. Regarding this last category, it is worth noting that the Ust includes notjust those works deriving directly from the dissertation but also subsequent studies on the same or related topics pubUshed through 1992. AU of this information aUows the reader to trace interesting academic genealogies, beginning with any AidMdual and foUowing a branch of scholarship through a veritable famAy tree of preceding mentors, which can estabUsh a legacy of critical methodology and often reveals what the authors have caUed "important centers and periods of scholarly pursuit" (1). Some of these Unes are rather impressive, indeed, and extend through five or six generations. To name one example, I easAy foUowed a direct Une beginning with Hugo Rennert along five successive generations of scholarly progeny, Aicluding James P. W. Crawford (whose 1907 dissertation is among the earUest included in the book), Otis Green, Bruce Wardropper, and then 228BCom, Vol. 52, No. 1 (2000) from either Douglas M. Carey to Anita StoU or Dian Fox to Mary Hivnor. In many cases, however, these genealogies are limited by the simple fact that many dissertation directors are Golden Age scholars who wrote their own theses on...

Unamuno's Intrahistoria and Jung's Collective Unconscious: Parallels, Convergences, and Common Sources

N HIS pioneering study of the Spanish Generation of 1898, Pedro Lain Entralgo wrote: No creo que sea violento establecer una relaci6n inmediata entre la 'intrahistoria' de Unamuno y la tesis del 'inconsciente sobrepersonal o colectivo' de (151). He was the first to express this opinion; Carlos Blanco Aguinaga has since remarked that ... evidente ya en las paginas de torno al casticismo, cuando al dejar las metaiforas para expresar la idea escueta, [Unamuno] declara que la intrahistoria es la inconciencia (236). More recently, Francisco Fernandez Turienzo again made a connection between intrahistoria and Jung's notion of the collective unconscious: En todo caso, hemos tropezado con la 'intrahistoria,' con el sentido universal de lo 'castizo,' que seri luego lo 'inconsciente colectivo' (Jung) (49-50). None of these suggestive observations, however, has been the object of substantive critical inquiry. I suggest that understanding the points of contact between intrahistoria and the collective unconscious is crucial, not only because it shows that Unamuno anticipated some of the most fundamental teachings of depth psychology, but also because such an understanding is indispensable to readings of Paz en la guerra, and Unamuno's last, great novel, San Manuel Bueno, mdrtir. Unamuno and Jung came from similar family backgrounds; more importantly, they were nurtured by the same late nineteenth-century European Zeitgeist. The adolescent and young adult years of both men

Neg-Transportation, Neg-Trace, and the Choice of Mood in Spanish

Proponents of Neg-transportation (NT) in Spanish disagree with respect to how the transformation comes to interact with the choice of mood in verbal complements. NT is the rule which raises the negation of a verbal complement to the governing verb: (1) a. Quiero que no salgas. 'I want you not to leave.' b. No quiero que salgas. 'I don't want you to leave.' (2) a. Creo que no es interesante. 'I think it is not interesting.' b. No creo que es interesante. 'I don't think it is interesting.' c. No creo que sea interesante. 'I don't think it is interesting.'

Ermanno Caldera: Il teatro di Moreto (review)

que represente su sombra, en mirando en él su imagen se templa y desapasiona (p. 59) When lovemaking is seen as a learning process , a preparation in deceptive conditions for a married life in which deceit may have no place, it is natural that the role of teacher should be assigned to love itself: "que es luz del entendimiento/amor" (p. 45). Laurencio , invoking the authority of Aristotle and Plato, declares that love is the professor of all knowledge porque sólo con amor aprende un hombre mejor sus divinas diferencias (p. 62). Thanks to love, he says, the desire for knowledge is inherent in man. Even Octavio , Finea's father, believes in the efficacy of love's pedagogy. He says of his daughter: luz va tomando ya; por cierto creo que si amor la enseñase, aprendería (p. 100). This "catedrático divino" (p. 115) finally imparts wisdom to Finea; the learning she has acquired is the continuing study of the man who is to be her husband: amor me ha enseñado; tú eres la ciencia que aprendo (p. 129). Through love's teaching Finea, the silly lady of a shadowy unreal comedy, is transformed into the potential wife of a serious honor play, a woman about to be devoted to her husband's good name and to the principles set forth in our first quotation: rule over her family and holy silence. She may expect now to progress from the world of appearances to the world of reality, from becoming to being. This, then, is how I propose we should regard the comedies of the Golden Age. The world of comedy, like the world of the serious play, is unstable and illusory. But in each of the two genres the characters are made to handle the problems of deceptive reality in quite different ways. A Segismundo , apprehending the world's engaño, learns to despise it, to probe beneath it until he finds the certainty of moral rectitude, and to live as if the deceitful world did not exist, sub specie aeternitatis. A Finea, apprehending this same engaño, learns to accept it, to live with it in human time, recognizing that it is but a transitory stage on the road to the moral rectitude that will be hers with marriage. The serious play requires its protagonist to seek the eternal essence underlying the illusion; the comedy requires him to seek his personal truth in the midst of the temporal illusion, to find grace in the sacramental life of worldly marriage. Ermanno Caldera: // teatro di Moreto Pisa: Editrice libreria goliardica, 1960. Pp. 236. Joseph Fucilla, Northwestern University. Mr. Caldera opens his discussion by showing how the political policy of Olivares and the moral philosophy of Gracián and the moralists of the day tried to transform reality by the creation of a world constructed according to the universal categories of reason . This is the climate in which Moreto works and moves. "La diffidenza verso gli impeti sensuali e sentimentali, la fiducia nella razionalità, Ia predilezione d'ogni forma di raffinatezza, il rispetto delle apparenze , la creazione di personaggi equilibrati e composti . . . fanno di Moreto un personaggio fortemente rappresentativo dell- 'epoca di Filippo IV" (op. cit. p. 23). In chapter I—"Atteggiamento revisionista nei confronti del teatro precedente," Mr. Caldera brings out that Moreto recognized Lope as the master of the Spanish stage. But from the viewpoint of the new generation his plays portrayed situations that clashed with the ideals of the times, and in his refundiciones he aimed at the removal of these objectionable traits. Comparison of El desdén con el desdén, Como se vengan los nobles, De fuera vendrá with the Lopean sources, and El lindo de Don Diego with its source, El Narciso en su opinion of Guillen de Castro, the drammatist closest to Lope, show how the tension between virtue and vice is eliminated or attenuated, with virtue, al- ways strictly rational in its manifestations, dominating the action. Much of this material could have been fused into the subsequent chapters and, in fact, some of the arguments re-appear in them a number of times. Nevertheless, the critic's comparative analysis...

The Modern Novel as Viewed by Ortega

More than any other contemporary Spaniard, Jos6 Ortega y Gasset has been most sensitive to the nature of problems facing modern man. In a vast variety of fields-embracing literature, art, music, sociology, psychology, philosophy-Ortega was the first Spaniard, often the first European, to put his finger squarely on the central core of such problems. Always, by means of an eloquent pen and voice, he set these problems before his compatriots. It is the intent here to show how this is true in one very limited and specific instance. In 1925 Ortega published some brief Ideas sobre la novela,/ at a time when a vast amount of interest was being directed toward this genre. An examination of his ideas, which have remained relatively unnoticed,2 proves fruitful for several rea'sons: they contain penetrating insights into various problems concerned with the novel; they provide a most revealing comparison with ideas of Pio Baroja, a practicing novelist; they show to what degree Ortega's thought has been attuned to one specific current critical preoccupation. Ortega, aware of current discussions in literary circles in the rest of Europe, and sensitive to an ausencia de mais s61idas reflexiones on the modern novel in current Spanish literary criticism (p. 387), drew his together around the development of two themes: a consideration of the nature of the then much talked about crisis of the novel, and an exposition of a few workable norms which he considered basic to a critical examination of the genre. The crisis of the novel -he summarized and explained thus: En suma, creo que el genero novela, si no est4 irremediablemente agotado, se halla, de cierto, en su periodo 'iltimo, y padece una tal penuria de temas posibles, que el escritor necesita compensarla con la exquisita calidad de los dem'is ingredientes necesarios para integrar un cuerpo de novela (p. 390). Such crisis involves both the author and the reader of novels. The novelist must face the fact, according to Ortega, that there no longer exist any plots which have not been used as the basis of novels, and he must recognize a change in readers' tastes which have become more discriminating: Conforme iba saliendo a la luz el tesoro de los temas posibles, la sensibilidad del puiblico se iba haciendo mis rigurosa y exacta. Lo que anteayer hubiera ai6n aceptado, ya no le sabia ayer. Necesitaba temas de mejor calidad, mis ins61litos, mis 'nuevos.' De suerte que paralelamente el agotamiento de temas nuevos, crece la exigencia de temas 'mas nuevos,' hasta que se produce en el lector un embotamiento de la facultad de impresiones (p. 389). Ortega encouraged the novelist to face this two-fold dilemma with confidence. For many years novelists have lamented the fact that there apparently exist no entirely new, never-before-used plots. That is easily understood, he explains, for there are only a limited number of plot situations. The problem is not a one, and there does exist an adequate solution: the novelist need only turn to the ever fecund reservoir of psychological study of individual souls. But more closely associated with his solution' for the apparent existence of no new plots is that given the problem posed by a 'change in readers' more discriminating tastes. Ortega believes that modern readers of novels are no longer as interested in simple adventure stories which now may appear naive. Just as greater