El Angel Research Articles

The Listener’s Gallery

The Listener’s Gallery Gregory Berg (bio) Were I With Thee. Michelle Areyzaga, soprano; Dana Brown, piano. (4 Tay CD066; 73:44) Edouard Lippé: “How do I love thee.” Wayland Rogers: “To My Dear and Loving Husband” (I-Thou). Tres Poemas de Gabriela Mistral: “El Aire,” “El Angel Guardian,” “Apegado a mi.” Leonard Bernstein: “A Julia de Burgos” (Songfest). John Duke: “What Lips My Lips Have Kissed.” Richard Pearson Thomas: “Wild Nights—Wild Nights!” “I Never Saw a Moor,” “At Last, To Be Identified” (At Last, To Be Identified). Gwyneth Walker: “La Luz.” Emily! (from New England): “My Letter to the World,” “The Moon and the Sea,” “The Frog in the Bog,” “Hope (with Feathers),” “Passion,” “Joy,” “All I Have to Bring.” Patrice Michaels: “Anita’s Story,” “Epilogue—The long View, Questions Answered” (The Long View: A Portrait of Ruth Bader Ginsburg in Nine Songs). Lee Hoiby: “The Waltz” (Three Women). The Shining Place: “The Shining Place,” “A Letter,” “How the Waters Closed,” “Wild Nights,” “There Came a Wind Like a Bugle.” Soprano Michelle Areyzaga is one of those treasured singers who creates gold out of everything she touches, conceiving compelling projects and executing them with exceptional skill. Her latest release, Were I With Thee, may be her finest achievement yet. It presents a selection of outstanding art songs with texts by woman writers. This simple concept has not been done as often as one might assume, and rarely, if ever, has it been carried out with such a high level of excellence. The title of the recording is drawn from Emily Dickinson’s remarkable poem “Wild Nights—Wild Nights!,” and three different settings of it, by Richard Pearson Thomas, Lee Hoiby, and Gwyneth Walker, serve as the disk’s artistic nexus. Moreover, an illustration of Emily Dickinson by one of her living descendants, Kandice Dickinson, adorns the cover of the disk. It is that kind of attention to detail that elevates this recording from very good to truly great. Twelve of these twenty-six songs are recorded here for the very first time, which only underscores the significance of this release. The writers and poets are a widely varied lot, with excellence being the one and only constant. Musically, the disk mostly focuses on neo-romantic repertoire, for which both the singer and pianist have a clear affinity. That affinity is abundantly clear in their impassioned performance of Edouard Lippé’s “How Do I Love Thee?” that opens the disk. One cannot imagine Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s famous text being given a more rhapsodic setting or being performed with more openhearted generosity. By the way, Lippé is best known as the primary voice teacher for both Nelson Eddy and Todd Duncan, but this song is a vivid indication of his considerable skill as a composer. From the pen of John Duke comes an expertly crafted setting of “What Lips My Lips Have Kissed” by Edna St. Vincent Millay, a potently expressive song that is given its world premiere recording here. Bernstein’s contribution to this collection is an excerpt from his wide ranging Songfest. It’s a setting of a fascinating poem by the gifted Puerto Rican writer and activist Julia de Burgos in which she strives to elucidate her role as a poet. Bernstein’s musical restlessness is a perfect mirror of the text’s unsettled nature. There is some of that same musical flavor in two excerpts from Patrice Michaels’s remarkable work From the Long View: A Portrait of Ruth Bader Ginsburg in Nine Songs. The remainder of the disk is given over to generous samplings of the songs of Gwyneth Walker, Lee Hoiby, Wayland Rogers, and Richard Pearson Thomas. Walker’s chief contribution to this recording is her stunning song cycle Emily!, which features marvelously crafted settings of seven poems by Emily Dickinson. There is a vivid, pictorial quality to Walker’s songs, as well as a sense that her songs spring directly from the beautiful natural world around her. This is the work’s world premiere recording. Walker also contributes to the proceedings a playful setting of “La Luz” by the Chilean poet and humanitarian Gabriela Mistral, the first Latin American writer to win...

Fictional and Non-fictional Narrative Representations of State Repression and Terror in the Dirty Wars in Argentina (1976-1983) and Chile (1973-1990)

I argue that fictional representations of the Dirty Wars in Argentina (1976-1983) and Chile (1973-1990) allow for the possibility of forgiveness and healing, while non-fictional representations such as testimonies and conversations do not. Focusing on a variety of fictional and non-fictional texts, I analyze why and how state repression inflicts trauma and violence upon its victims and survivors. The novels I analyze are no place for heroes by Laura Restrepo, El Angel’s Last Conquest by Elvira Orphée and Bedside manners by Luisa Valenzuela. The non–fictional works I analyze are Nunca Mas: A Report By Argentina’s National Commission on Disappeared People, That Inferno: Conversations of Five Women Survivors of an Argentine Torture Camp, Circle Over Death: Testimonies of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo and We, Chile: Personal Testimonies of the Chilean Arpilleristas. The theoretical underpinnings of my arguments are Paul Ricouer’s Memory, History, Forgetting (2004) and Avishai Margalit’s The Ethics of Memory (2002), both of which attempt to think through the relationship between forgetting and forgiving.

Cuando la revolución es en femenino, es vandalismo. La Revolución de la Brillantina y la pugna por la memoria

En este artículo analizaré la Revolución de la Brillantina, nombre con el que se le conoce a dos manifestaciones que tuvieron lugar en la ciudad de México en agosto de 2019, en las que se denunció el alarmante incremento a nivel nacional de casos de violencia de género. Me centraré en las pintas de grafiti que se realizaron sobre el Ángel de la Independencia a manera de denuncia y en la reacción mediática en torno a esta forma de protesta. Planteo que estas intervenciones fueron una tentativa por parte de las colectivas feministas de (re)apropiarse de la narrativa histórica que se materializa en el monumento del Ángel y que las reacciones en medios y redes sociales evidencian las desigualdades sexo-genéricas (étnicas y de clase también) que predominan en la memoria colectiva mexicana. Para este análisis recurriré a fuentes documentales, principalmente prensa y foros en redes sociales en los que discutió sobre las intervenciones.

Nuevos registros de líquenes terrícolas en los páramos ecuatorianos

Se presentan 49 nuevas citas para los páramos de El Cajas y El Ángel, en las provincias de Azuay y Carchi, respectivamente. Se encontraron los nuevos registros para Ecuador Cladonia scabriuscula, Cora accipiter, C. caucensis, C. dalehana, C. hafecesweorthensis, C. inversa, Dictyonema caespitosum y Diploschistes hypoleucus. Para Ecuador continental se reporta Cladonia corymbosula, y el nuevo quimiotipo Cladonia squamosa QIII, con ácidos estíctico y barbático. Se documentan 39 nuevos registros para las provincias de Azuay y Carchi.

Buñuel's Phantoms

Through studying select works by auteur Luis Bunuel, focusing in particular on his 1962 masterpiece El angel exterminador, this article explores cinematic time and the latent, spectral temporalities underlying the medium of film itself—delay, repetition, prolonged or extended time, time constrained or condensed, tempo-ral aporias or gaps, and the sensation of time as asynchronous with actuality. Bunuel’s works wield poetic constructions of time indebted to the surrealist ap-proach, and thus to rupturing order, sense, chronology, and linearity. Across these filmic constructions—what I will call here, meditations on time—there is an acute rendering of time as doubled, lost, and/or unsettled. Bunuel cinematically crafts temporal modes that fold, embed, and/or crystallize other times within them. At the heart of this essay is a deep desire to understand how Bunuel’s cin-ema operates both in and with time, and how it cultivates slowness and modes of deferral tethered to attention and captivation that hold us and make us aware of time’s inner-workings. I locate Bunuel’s oeuvre at the center of a modern cinema invested in philosophical ruminations on time—time’s proliferation, perforation, and entanglements of multiple temporalities, its spectral nature; films that ac-tively contemplate the time created and “sculpted,” to draw on Andrei Tarkovsky’s evocative phrase, by the act of filming and through the experience of film viewing that they invite.

¿Quién es El Ángel (1961-1995)? Poesía y vida en el lado salvaje de la transición española

Intentamos trazar aquí una unión entre vida y obra para presentar a un poeta y músico desconocido de la transición española, El Ángel (1961-1995). Nos centramos en el repaso de su experiencia vital y su sociedad como claves para entender sus poemas. Una vida de riesgo y transgresión, en un viaje a través de las drogas, la heroína, el amor, la enfermedad o el punk y el rock. Este autor desafía el discurso oficial de su tiempo sobre la democracia, la movida ochentera y la cultura, para colocarse conscientemente en el margen, la contracultura, la subcultura y la autodestrucción.

Sustainable use of the buffer zone of El Angel ecological reserve, Ecuador

Sustainable use of the buffer zone of El Angel ecological reserve, Ecuador

Variations in water resources availability at the Ecuadorian páramo due to land-use changes

In the highest part of the basin of the El Angel River (Northern Ecuador), there is an ecological reserve that has the same name of the watershed. The anthropogenic activities that take place in the basin concerning productive effects have influenced a change in land use, which has caused variations in supply and demand for water, so therefore it requires the analysis of vulnerability for taking decisions on water management using hydrological modeling tools. The purpose of this investigation was to develop a methodology for analyzing vulnerability of water resource with the generation of different scenarios of simulation of land-use changes during the years 2000 and 2014. The results demonstrate that when there are land-use changes, the water vulnerability increases. To cope with climate change and variability, it is necessary to generate adaptation and mitigation actions for water users.

Understanding Juan Benet: New Perspectives by Benjamin Fraser

Reviewed by: Understanding Juan Benet: New Perspectives by Benjamin Fraser Ryan A. Davis Understanding Juan Benet: New Perspectives U of South Carolina P, 2013 by Benjamin Fraser One might be excused for thinking Ben Fraser has tilted at windmills with his latest contribution, which sets out to help readers make sense of the writings of Juan Benet by attempting to combine civil engineering, Bergsonian philosophy, and cultural geography into a coherent explanatory framework. To the skeptic, such an amalgamation of seemingly disparate subject matters may smack of scholarly alchemy, conveniently combining in a single monograph recent intellectual issues that grace the pages of Fraser’s previous publications, which are legion. And yet, much like Cervantes’s anachronistic knight, Fraser deserves praise for gaining much where much has been ventured. If the world of Benet is as “dazzlingly complex” as Randolph Pope suggests it is on the dusk jacket of Fraser’s book, then readers should not be surprised to find that Fraser has, in his slender volume (136 pages of text and notes), produced a fair share of gold from his scholarly alchemy. To get at this gold, Fraser first sets the parameters of his focus, and thus readers’ expectations. His study is neither a compendium of previous Benetian scholarship nor an exegesis of Benet’s major works (3). Rather, it offers “new perspectives that allow us to gain a greater appreciation of the themes and qualities most central to Benet’s work as a whole” (17). Specifically, the themes of civil engineering, Bergsonian philosophy, and cultural geography, which comprise chapters two through four, respectively. In his first chapter, Fraser offers an overview of the Spanish Civil War, drawing (primarily, though not solely) on Gerald Brenan’s seminal study and a Benet essay Fraser finds unfortunately peripheral in Benetial scholarship, ¿Qué fue la guerra civil? He sees a common thread tying together Spanish society’s prewar preoccupation with the “agrarian question,” the effects of the war on Spanish land and territory, and Benet’s singular interest in, and literary focus on, landscape. Given the explanatory intent of the Understanding series, as well as Fraser’s own intellectual interest in spatiality, it is unfortunate that a map or two was not included to orient readers less familiar with the war. That said, Fraser effectively links the significance of landscape in Benet’s depiction of Región to the role of land and territory (the agrarian question) in the war. Fraser’s emphasis on land and landscape provides for a smooth transition to chapter two, in which he links Benet’s literature to his concrete engagement with the land as a civil engineer. He sees Benet’s involvement in, and writings about, public works as engaging with figures like Costa, who looked to material explanations for, and solutions to, Spain’s uneven process of modernization and, by extension, social strife. For instance, he notes how in Benet’s writings, “the bridge becomes a synecdoche for the historical and ideological tensions of the civil war... it symbolizes more universal themes of difference and (potential if frustrated) reconciliation” (52). In chapter three, Fraser discusses Benet’s Bergsonism in Benet’s El angel del señor abandona a Tobías, “Un extempore,” Una meditación (specifically Bergson’s ideas on time and memory), and La inspiración y el estilo. Key to understanding Bergson, for Fraser, is recognizing the French philosopher’s insistence on the “fundamental reality of a temporal experience that is fluid, ever changing, and ultimately irreducible to spatial models” (55). And yet complicating [End Page 285] matters is the fact that the human intellect essentially spatializes time (i.e., seeks to fix it in “static forms and immobile concepts”) in an effort to understand this reality (55). Fraser summarizes how Benet’s Bergsonism manifests in his writings in this way: “By plunging themselves headlong into the past, Benet’s narrators and characters isolate themselves from others, cut short the very possibility of action in the present, and detach themselves from a shifting and changing duration to relieve fragmented moments of the past in isolation from others” (66). He concludes the chapter by linking Benet’s notions of inspiration and style to the...

Un pájaro progresivo: Pop Music, Propaganda, and the Struggle for Modernity in Argentina

In the mid-1960s to mid-1970s, North America and Western Europe became cemented as modern liberal democracies, increasingly emphasizing civil liberties, individualism, egalitarianism, and diversity. In the Southern Cone those same modernizing tendencies faced strong opposition from the landed elite and the military, who targeted the counterculture’s young people and staged numerous coups in an attempt to turn back the clock. The propaganda of Argentina’s brutal and humorless Proceso dictatorship attempted to recreate an imaginary past, a caricature of classic ideals such as el angel del hogar and the Latin Honor Code. But its repressive machinery was countered by another “machine,” a rock band headed by Charly Garcia called La Maquina de Hacer Pajaros, who combined music, film, comics, and pop culture icons in a witty discourse that subtly contradicted that of the military government, at a time when any dissent was extremely dangerous. La Maquina, which cartoonist and Garcia contemporary “Crist” described as “ un pajaro progresivo ,” deconstructed the regime’s authoritarian discourse, reconstructing in its place a lyrical depiction of liberal democratic ideals.

The 3640–3510 BC rhyodacite eruption of Chachimbiro compound volcano, Ecuador: a violent directed blast produced by a satellite dome

Based on geochronological, petrological, stratigraphical, and sedimentological data, this paper describes the deposits left by the most powerful Holocene eruption of Chachimbiro compound volcano, in the northern part of Ecuador. The eruption, dated between 3640 and 3510 years BC, extruded a ∼650-m-wide and ∼225-m-high rhyodacite dome, located 6.3 km east of the central vent, that exploded and produced a large pyroclastic density current (PDC) directed to the southeast followed by a sub-Plinian eruptive column drifted by the wind to the west. The PDC deposit comprises two main layers. The lower layer (L1) is massive, typically coarse-grained and fines-depleted, with abundant dense juvenile fragments from the outgassed dome crust. The upper layer (L2) consists of stratified coarse ash and lapilli laminae, with juvenile clasts showing a wide density range (0.7–2.6 g cm−3). The thickness of the whole deposit ranges from few decimeters on the hills to several meters in the valleys. Deposits extending across six valleys perpendicular to the flow direction allowed us to determine a minimum velocity of 120 m s−1. These characteristics show striking similarities with deposits of high-energy turbulent stratified currents and in particular directed blasts. The explosion destroyed most of the dome built during the eruption. Subsequently, the sub-Plinian phase left a decimeter-thick accidental-fragment-rich pumice layer in the Chachimbiro highlands. Juvenile clasts, rhyodacitic in composition (SiO2 = 68.3 wt%), represent the most differentiated magma of Chachimbiro volcano. Magma processes occurred at two different depths (∼14.4 and 8.0 km). The hot (∼936 °C) deep reservoir fed the central vent while the shallow reservoir (∼858 °C) had an independent evolution, probably controlled by El Angel regional fault system. Such destructive eruptions, related to peripheral domes, are of critical importance for hazard assessment in large silicic volcanic complexes such as those forming the Frontal Volcanic Arc of Ecuador and Colombia.

Una nueva especie ecuatoriana del género de peces andinos <i>Grundulus</i> (Characiformes: Characidae)

The new species Grundulus quitoensis is described from El Voladero Lake, El Angel Biological Reserve, Northern Ecuador. The new taxon can be distinguished from all congeners by the following characters, respectively: a low number of unbranched rays in the anal fin (three vs. four-five) and in pectoral fins (on vs. two - three), a higher number of dentary teeth (12-14 vs. 8-10), a second infraorbital about three times larger than the first (vs. about two times larger), a third infraorbital which is not in contact with the preopercle (vs. in contact with preopercle), the presence of four small fenestrae in the infero-lateral bone dentary (vs. one - two); and a premaxilla which presents a long lateral process (vs. short), a maxilla with two notches in the infero-lateral surface (vs. one notch in the infero-lateral surface).

Vegetation composition and altitudinal distribution of Andean rain forests in El Angel and Guandera reserves, northern Ecuador

Patterns of vascular plant species composition and structure of the remaining rain forest of the Andean Cordillera in northern Ecuador were studied in two reserves: Guandera and El Angel. Thirty three plots located between 3300 and 3700 in were examined along two altitudinal transects crossing the Upper Forest Line (UFL). The phytosociological subdivision using TWINSPAN revealed two communities for Guandera and five communities for El Angel on the basis of both floristic composition and percentage of cover. The distribution pattern of these forest communities clearly corresponds to a humidity gradient declining East to West from Guandera to El Angel. The high Andean and the Andean rain forest zones of Guandera were not floristically discernable by our analysis at the community level. The Guandera forest patches in paramo (3550-3700 m) are in terms of structure and floristic coinposition similar to the high Andean forest below the UFL (3600-3620 m), differing only at the level of variants. This indicates that the separation of the forest patch is relatively recent or that the forest patch was easily colonized by direct input from the high Andean forest located at ca. 50 m from the patch. No direct floristic affinity was detected between the forest types identified in our study area and 14 other forest sites of Colombia and Ecuador. The sharp and abrupt present-day UFL in Guandera (at 3640 m) is probably a consequence of frequent and extensive fires. All this suggests that the natural UFL was at slightly higher altitude in the undisturbed setting. In El Angel, the natural UFL as well as the high Andean forest have disappeared by clear cutting leading to a process of paramizacion. Thus the isolated asteraceous forest patches at 3740 m could not be Compared to the high Andean forest stands in El Angel. The Andean forest patches in El Angel currently suffer from continuous wood extraction and are becoming depleted

A phytosociological study of the páramo along two altitudinal transects in El Carchi province, northern Ecuador

We here present a plant composition study of paramo grasslands in the East Andean Cordillera of northern Ecuador that discerns altitudinal distribution patterns. This study took place at two locations: the relatively undisturbed Guandera Biological Reserve site and the highly disturbed El Angel Ecological Reserve site. The analysis included a field survey following the releve method of Braun-Blanquet. The Study focussed oil altitudinal distributions of specific plant communities discernable by our analysis, as well as for traces of human influence in these communities. We examined 100 plots of zonal and azonal paramo vegetation located between 3400 and 4000 in altitude. The phytosociological classification by means of TWINSPAN revealed seven paramo communities at the association level (three for zonal paramo proper and three for azonal bogs), which clustered each into two alliances and one zonal order on the basis of both floristic composition and percentage of cover. The newly described phytosociological order Espeletio pyenophyllae-Calamagrostietalia effusae unifies all the zonal bunchgrass paramos of the Guandera-El Angel study area. There was no structural subparamo community detectable in our study area. Tills can probably be explained by the frequent fires that affect the paramo-forest ecotone and which result into a sharp discontinuity in the vegetation at the upper forest line location in Guandera. For Guandera we described two distinct zonal paramo communities: a bamboo patch and paramo islands in high Andean Forest. In El Angel, the floristic composition of subassociation paspaletosum bonplandiani (bunchgrass paramo at 3430-3550 m) of the Gynoxyo-Calamagrostietum suggests that the vegetation of this syntaxon was probably located on former forested land, as evidenced by the disappearance of high Andean forest and the upper part of Andean forest, combined with the presence of many native and exotic weedy species. The presence of distinct taxa in the subassociation of Paspalum bonplandianum undeniably was a response to habitat alteration induced by human activities. I-or the azonal paramo, we describe three communities at the association level; two of them belonging to the newly established alliance Paepalantho muscosi-Oreobolion cleefii, marking a separate northern Ecuadorian alliance and including the first report of a Xyris cushion bog in Ecuador.

La doble cara del discurso doméstico en la España liberal: El Ángel del hogar de Pilar Sinués

The establishment of the Liberal project in Spain was accompanied by the emergence of new discourses on femininity. In the mid-nineteenth century, when the features that the ideal Spanish woman should embody were being debated, Pilar Sinues de Marco published El Angel del hogar. This article seeks to examine the construction of discourses on gender status and the feminine ideal in the nineteenth century. The study of this work within its context of composition enables us to focus on the confrontation and negotiation of symbols, on the reinterpretation of concepts and on the formulation of cultural alternatives that were present in the process whereby the values that would hold sway in the Spain of that period were being decided.

El ángel exterminador de Luis Buñuel: auto sacramental cinematográfico

"Todavía soy ateo, gracias a Dios" ha declarado el director espanol Luis Buñuel, y sin embargo, ha creado en El ángel exterminador um auto sacramental para nuestros tiempos, más cercana a la tradición hispano-católica literaria que a las obras francesas existencialistas con las que esta película suele compararse. En este ensayo intento aclarar los motivos bíblicos y literarios que informan la estructura, el desarrollo y el desenlace de esta obra maestra del cine y ofrecer una interpretación. De gran importancia son episodios del Génesis, del Apocalipsis y El gran teatro del mundo, auto sacramental de Calderón de la Barca.

The potential contribution of geomorphology to tropical mountain development: The case of the MANRECUR project

A comprehensive interdisciplinary study of a small Andean watershed in Ecuador [Poats, J.V., 2002. El Angel River Watershed Carchi, Ecuador. Disk 9 of 9. In: Himalayan Andean Collaborative Watershed Project, International Development Resource Centre, Ottawa] has produced practical recommendations for its sustainable management, with emphasis on new governance mechanisms. Comparatively little is said about questions of watershed stability in geomorphic terms, though water supply, sources and sinks are identified as crucially important. In this paper, three alternative frameworks, those of montology, less favoured area investment and panarchy, are examined. It is concluded that each of these frameworks, by insisting on a balance between socio-economic and biophysical analysis, does offer scope for the incorporation of geomorphic concepts though none of them demand explicit geomorphic content. The framework, which seems most flexible, is the panarchy metaphor [Holling, C.S., 2001. Understanding the complexity of economic, ecological and social systems. Ecosystems 4: 390–405.]. Not only does this framework insist on asking questions about the socio-economic and biophysical organisation of the watershed system, but it also leads to some arresting conclusions about the probable imminent collapse of watersheds under increasing population and land-use pressure. The panarchy metaphor identifies collapse and reorganisation as a common characteristic of socio-economic and biophysical systems. If this metaphor is even close to being accurate, the first issue in sustainable management of this small Andean watershed is how to ensure a “creative” collapse leading to a more sustainable system. A significant geomorphic contribution in this context would seem to include the identification of functioning hydro-geomorphic response units, connectivities and spatial-scale effects leading to more nuanced application of management strategies.

From L'Âge d'or to El día de la Bestia: Between the Ideal and the Unspeakable

That Alex de la Iglesia’s El dia de la Bestia (1995) is reminiscent in spirit of Bunuel’s work has not gone unnoticed. The director himself comments on how Claude Chabrol had said to him at the Venice Film Festival that ‘a Don Luis le hubiera encantado’, and this feeling is echoed by de la Iglesia’s interviewer (Ordonez 1997, p. 69). In the same volume, de la Iglesia discusses his admiration for Bunuel, particularly in relation to the Mexican films of the 1950s and 1960s. Rather than stating overtly how Bunuel has influenced him as a director, de la Iglesia comments on the extreme effect that the films provoked in him as a spectator: ‘Ese nivel de locura creativa de Bunuel atraviesa sus peliculas y te contagia. Yo no puedo ver Los olvidados o El angel [exterminador ]. No puedo verlas ENTERAS. Me ponen la piel de gallina, es una intensidad insoportable’ (Ordonez 1997, p. 69). For de la Iglesia, Bunuel’s Mexican cinema has a paradoxical and perverse attraction. As a spectator he is enthralled and unhealthily compelled by what he sees (‘te contagia’) but at the same time cannot bring himself to keep watching. The reaction might be defined as a blend of desire and repulsion, and as such comes close to the pathology of the obsessive. De la Iglesia has made one clear cinematic response to Bunuel’s El angel exterminador (1962) which provides a good example of how the director incorporates his fascination for the anatomy of obsession. The theme of self-imposed imprisonment is echoed in La comunidad (2000) in the farcical scene where the heroine struggles to leave the apartment block. This scene highlights strong parallels between the two directors’ work, whilst also reminding us of the obvious differences. As in El angel exterminador, there is an exploration of pathological behaviour brought about through urban socialization, but the entrapment here has a logical explanation

Sobre los àngeles: evolución del cuento fantástico latinoamericano en el siglo XX

The fantastic represents a constant in Latin American narrative of the 20th Century. This article analyses the presence and evolution of this narrative mode in Latin American literature through the study of four short stories, each representing a different literary trend: the 'modernismo' of marvellous tone ('El angel caido', Amado Nervo), the demystifying magical realism ('Un senor muy viejo con unas alas enormes', Gabriel Garcia Marquez), the transgressive post-boom ('El angel caido', Cristina Peri Rossi), and the feminist post-modernism ('Moraleja para angeles', Sonia Gonzalez Valdenegro). The main theories on the fantastic are reviewed and used in the particular analysis of the short stories: from the classic distinction established by Todorov between the marvellous, the uncanny, and the fantastic to the most recent critical studies (Lucie Armitt, Remo Ceserani, etc.), including other decisive and essential contributions such as those by Rosemary Jackson and Irene Bessiere.

Buñuel and México: The Crisis of National Cinema (review)

Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies 261 at the end of the text might have been profitably pruned, though the author's scholarly zeal may serve the budding specialist. The plot summaries , too, bear abbreviation. The decision to translate some but not all of the quotations is perplexing—no systematic pattern is discernible —and surely responds to the press's marketing illusions. One must also take to task the manuscript's copy editors for allowing typographical errors and other slips to mar a product that in substantive respects does the press proud. Johnson's book is a notable contribution to the writings on gender and nation that have been streaming into the forum of late. In a climate where "value" is shunned and no text suffers alongside any other, this appreciation of the novel as socio-historical document and purveyor of messages leaves to wallow in their nostalgia those still tied to the assessment of literature qua literature, which means that the book, like its seasoned author, is very much of John W. Kronik Cornell University Buñuel and México: The Crisis of National Cinema The University of California Press, 2003 By Ernesto Acevedo-Muñoz Ernesto Acevedo-Muñoz's valuable contribution to the still growing corpus of Buñuel studies takes aim at two critical axioms that have long shaped—or inhibited—considerations of the director's Mexican career. The first, grounded in Bufiuel's status as an international art cinema auteur and propagated in part by the director himself, dismisses the bulk of the Spanish exile's Mexican productions as forgettable, commercial films motivated by the simple need for economic survival. The second, rooted in a contrary emphasis on national cinemas and cinematic nationalism, offers an endorsement of Bufiuel's outsider standing by denying his role, and that of his films, within the history of Mexican cinema. In opposition to both these positions, Buñuel and México argues for the "Mexicanness" of Bufiuel's Mexican films, or at least for those features made between 1946 and 1965 and financed and produced within the context of the Mexican film industry and destined primarily for domestic audiences. (It should be noted that he distinguishes between "festival-bound international projects" such as The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, Nazarin, El angel exterminador and the French language, Cek s'appelle l'aurore and Le mort dans ce jardin, among others, and Bufiuel's "truly Mexican films" [149].) Acevedo-Muñoz offers a series of persuasive arguments for recognizing the full extent of Bufiuel's integration into the national film industry in Mexico: his participation via his producers in government financing schemes and his work in government supported studios; his (sometimes reluctant) embrace of rhe reigning star system; and his films' engagement with recurring national themes and debates regarding the legacy of the Mexican revolution, the conflict berween tradition and modernity and the role of gender in sustaining or questioning dominant definitions of national identity. Nevertheless , in making the case for a Mexican Buñuel, Acevedo-Muñoz doesn'r seek to undo previous conceptions of a surrealist Spanish or European auteur Buñuel. Instead his explorations of the cultural, political and industrial contexts of the director's Mexican films offer a corrective or amplification to auteurist readings drawing on the notion of the "industrial auteur" developed in Judith Mayne's work on pioneer female Hollywood director Dorothy Arzner (13). Likewise, the "crisis of national cinema" cited in the book's subtitle refers not to Bufiuel's role in the breakdown of national cinema as a critical paradigm but rather to his place with respect to Mexico's "Golden Age" of the 1940s and 1950s, a moment when Mexican cinema served the dual and even contradictory goals of projecting a vision of national cultural policy and providing a model of a national (or continental ) popular cinema capable of challenging Hollywood's domination across Latin America. 262 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies Acevedo-Muñoz presenrs a complex and nuanced account of Bufiuel's relations with and role wirhin rhe Mexican film industry of the period. Bunuel immersed himself in rhe modes of production and concomitant narrative and rhematic strategies of...