La Cautiva Research Articles

Sound, Noisy Feelings, and the Audible Sublime in Nineteenth-Century Latin America

Abstract: This article delves into the aural dimensions of Latin American literary tradition, exploring those instances when the sublime provides the vocabulary and syntax to textually inscribe sonic phenomena. As highlighted by Ana María Ochoa Gautier, the audible techniques cultivated by lettered elites found a way into their writing, thus forming a rich textual archive where they registered sounds, voices, and noises that often defied classification and overwhelmed the senses. In reading texts for sounds that emphasize adversity, discordance, and sono-racial designations, this article traces the sort of negative emotions characterizing Edmund Burke's and later theorists' definitions of the sublime as a combination of pleasure and pain, a negative moment of disturbance and confusion. Focusing on the sonic features of political writings by Simón Bolívar and foundational fictions such as Esteban Echeverría's La cautiva (1837) and Jorge Isaacs 's María (1867) , this article illustrates how sound shapes the discursive articulation of defining binaries such as civilization-barbarism, reason-emotion, nature-culture, and mind-matter.

Multi-Camera Workflow Applied to a Cultural Heritage Building: Alhambra’s Torre de la Cautiva from the Inside

It is increasingly necessary to generate accessible and navigable digital representations of historical or heritage buildings. This article explains the workflow that was applied to create such a digital component for one of the least accessible areas of the Alhambra palace in Granada, the so-called Torre de la Cautiva (Tower of the Captive). The main goal of this process was to create affordable, photorealistic 3D models that contribute to the dissemination of cultural heritage, the decision making for its conservation and restoration, and public engagement and entertainment. With enough preparation, the time spent gathering data following a Structure from Motion (SfM) approach can be significantly reduced by using a multi-camera (low cost DSLR) photogrammetric strategy. Without the possibility of artificial lighting, it was essential to use RAW images and calibrate the color in the scene for material and texture characterization. Through processing, the amount of data was reduced by optimizing the model’s topology. Thus, a photorealistic result was obtained that could be managed and visualized in immersive Visual Reality (VR) environments, simulating different historical periods and environmental and lighting conditions. The potential of this method allows, with slight modifications, the creation of HBIMs and the adaptation to VR systems development, whose current visualization quality is below the resolution of actionable models in rendering engines.

Desarmonías del archivo nacional. Sujeción poética del paisaje en La cautiva de Echeverría

Según el protocolo de apropiación del Desierto como patrimonio nacional en la “Advertencia” de Rimas de Esteban Echeverría (publicado en Buenos Aires en 1837), la imaginación geográfica traza el ideario económico-estético de explotación organizada del territorio. Autonomizado de Rimas como poema fundacional de la literatura argentina, La cautiva comprime el Desierto en una estructura de rima resonante y métrica forzada, dominada por la voz lírica a resguardo de la naturaleza que devora a la pareja de seres ideales, subordinados a la descripción espacial. Pautada por la interioridad espiritual de quien contempla el espacio enmarcado como paisaje, la desarmonía rítmica materializa contradicciones políticas y estéticas de la adaptación sudamericana del credo romántico, por las cuales La cautiva alienta un funcionamiento del archivo literario menos subalterno que el pautado por la política cultural de la Nación.

In(ter)venciones estéticas en Ema, la cautiva, de César Aira

This article analyzes the way in which Cesar Aira intervenes in the 19th century Argentine literary metanarrative through the re-elaboration of one of its main themes: the peculiar culture generated by the encounter between the indigenous people and the occupying military outposts of the territory of Pampa. In Ema, la cautiva Aira uses this historical and narrative space to superimpose a writing that deliberately traverses the topics of civilization and barbarism. The narration is an aesthetic in(ter)vention in a border story, characterized by the introduction of a new language that establishes its own references. The anachronisms, the mixture of genres, the stylistic ruptures, the praise of frivolity, indifference, exoticism, and hedonism break with the canon and inscribe the novel in the most innovative contemporaneity of Argentine literature.

Cautivos de los Discursos: Parodia de la Novela Histórica Post-Dictatorial en El Placer de la Cautiva de Leopoldo Brizuela

After the fall of the last dictatorship in Argentina, the historical novel has undergone profound transformations encouraging literary critics to associate it with the process of the redemocratization of the region. Indeed, the genre can be seen to express an important political dimension promoting democracy, diversity, and inclusion. It can, on occasion, rewrite national history and include new and often unorthodox perspectives on the past, thereby rescuing traditionally marginalized groups from oblivion. However, the fictionalization of history and the transformation of its discourse are formulated from a perspective deeply rooted in modernity, and the democratic project extrapolated from these novels is limited, therefore, to a mere reorganization of traditional discourses that persistently excludes groups of non-European heritage from the national project. The short novel El placer de la cautiva by Leopoldo Brizuela, analyzed in this article, offers a parody of the genre that draws on the disconnect between the democratic dimension of historical fiction and the ongoing marginalization of indigenous peoples in Argentina.

The Subversive Variations of the Theme of Civilization and Barbarism in Cesar Aira’s Ema, la cautiva

The Subversive Variations of the Theme of Civilization and Barbarism in Cesar Aira’s Ema, la cautiva

Ema is by Nature a Political Animal: Politics and Capitalism in César Aira's Ema, la cautiva

Where much research focuses on comic and playful elements in César Aira's work, or on the forms of Aira's literature and its relationship with Argentine or Latin American literary tradition, this paper constructs a political reading of Aira's novel Ema, la cautiva. I consider the historical circumstances of the periods in which Aira set and published his novel (immediately prior to the culminating episode in the Conquest of the Desert in 1879 and during the military government of 1976–1983 when references to the Conquest of the Desert were utilised to justify the ‘dirty war’) to argue that, although Aira's ironic mode of writing makes the development of parallels between historical periods fraught with difficulty, the novel contains a latent critique of the military government, of the dirty war and of Peronist economic policies prior to the coup of 1976. Additionally, I argue that Ema, la cautiva contains a political critique of the arguments for the capitalist system at its inception and that the novel can be read together with the work of Deleuze and Guattari to explore the development of capitalism and expose the apparent freedoms gained through it as allusive and as substitutes for a new type of subjection.

What Is, Is Not: Dante in Tomás Eloy Martínez's Purgatorio

Tomás Eloy Martínez's last novel, Purgatorio, is a meditation on the effects of violence and repression under 1970s Argentine dictatorial regimes. Like its antecedent, El Infierno (1981) by Carlos Martínez Moreno, Tomás Eloy Martínez's work draws on the Divine Comedy through creative distortion, an approach to Dante as old as Esteban Echeverría's foundational Argentine poem La cautiva (1832). El Infierno and Purgatorio complement each other, yet Tomás Eloy Martínez draws on Dante's Purgatorio in specific ways to craft a notion of ‘purgatory’ better suited than Dante's to address the loss and longing of a fractured generation.

El poema extenso como institución cultural. Forma poética e identidad americana en Bello, Heredia y Echeverría

Fecha de recepción: 5 de octubre de 2006.Fecha de aceptación: 7 de agosto de 2007.Este trabajo integra el análisis de la forma "poema extenso" con el análisis de la construcción de la identidad americana en algunos de los poemas largos hispanoamericanos más importantes del período 1820-1840: Al Popocatepetl, En el teocalli de Cholula, Niágara y Placeres de la melancolía, de Heredia; Alocución a la poesía y A la agricultura de la zona tórrida, de Bello; y La cautiva, de Echeverría. Superando el molde del poema épico-fundacional, la dimensión de estos textos busca proyectar analógicamente la vastedad de la materia del poema y garantizar su "visibilidad", su capacidad representativa y su perduración como institución cultural.

Male Anxiety and Sacrificial Masculinity: The Case of Echeverria

This article analyzes the problematic performance of masculinity in the writings of Esteban Echeverr�a. The author compares Echeverr�a to his Argentine counterparts in the Generaci�n de 1837; to North American writers similarly struggling with a crisis of masculinity and national identity; and, briefly, to the Romantics. The author also offers insightful readings of Echeverr�a's nonfictional writings, both his autobiographical texts and political treatises; and of "La cautiva" and "El matadero."

Reading the Warning: The Reader and the Image of the Captive Woman

In David Haberly's otherwise excellent article, Captives and Infidels: Figure of the Cautiva in Argentine Literature, he states that The fact that female captives were raped or forced into marriage is lamented, but this involuntary miscegenation is not the focus of anger and disgust, a clear departure from the North American case/'1 This statement so caught my attention that I reread some of the captive stories to see if I had misread them the first time. stories were La cautiva (1837) by Esteban Echeverr?a; La vuelta de Mart?n Fierro (1879) by Jos? Hern?ndez; Tabar? (1888) by Juan Zorrilla de San Mart?n; and Marta Riquelme (1902) by the Anglo-Argentine William Henry Hudson. second reading confirmed my first impression that rape and miscegenation are indeed the focus of disgust, and furthermore, there is a clear warning that the desert is a place of sexual danger and even death. Why did my reading differ from that of such a respected and able critic as Haberly? answer is simple: I read as a woman.

Borges' "El Aleph" - Some Thematic Considerations

In his Epilogo, Borges states fuera de 'Emma Zunz' ... y de la 'Historia del guerrero y de la cautiva' . .. las piezas de este libro corresponden al g6nero fantAstico. (p. 171) The fantastic forms the greatest part of Borges' fiction production. But although there are elements which are fantastic in appearance, his particular genius arises from the service which he makes them perform. Certainly the fantastic tale is not a novelty-it is an eminent part of folklore tradition, in which context it is believed. The fantastic-centered literary creation was an integral part of fiction with the Romantic writers in their search for themes which would support their distorted philosophy of the ego and the universe. With Borges, the fantastic is a cultivated flower -a hothouse product of his fecund mind. Borges, an extremely cultured man (one need only to observe the explicit and implicit references in his work to world literature and philosophy), forges a type of short story out of his intellectual background and his romantic predilection for the fantastic.

The Epigraphs in Esteban Echeverria's "La Cautiva"

mance, Cautiva. It is possible, however, that not all will have considered the use made by this Argentinian poet of the epigraph in this poem. About one-third of the poem is presented in Nina Lee Weisinger's Readings from Spanish-American Authors (D. C. Heath and Company, 1929).1 No epigraph, however, is included in this extended selection, nor is reference made to the part played by the epigraph in the poem. The Antologia de poetas hispano-americanos of Menendez y Pelayo, as reprinted in 1927-1928 in Madrid, includes in its fourth volume, between pp. 175 and 238 the complete poem, with the exception of the epigraphs. The editor discusses La Cautiva on pages clxx-clxxii of his introduction in the same volume, and mentions the epigraph placed by Walter at the beginning of his translation of the leyenda into German, Res, non verba, without mentioning any of the epigraphs which are part of the Spanish original. Sketches of the use made of the epigraph as a literary device are available in the seventh volume of Pierre Larousse's Grand dictionnaire universel du XIXe siecle