La Destruccion Research Articles

Exceso y transporte: más allá de la ‘destrucción’ lascasiana

Este articulo forma parte de una investigacion mas amplia sobre la Brevisima relacion de la destruccion de las Indias, de fray Bartolome de las Casas, desde el punto de vista de la crueldad. Se centra en la lectura teologica o religiosa del marques de Sade realizada por Pierre Klossowski en Sade, mi projimo y sometida a critica por Annie Le Brun en Sade, de pronto un bloque de abismo, asi como en los aspectos de ambos textos relativos a la violencia y el goce que iluminan, desde un angulo extrano, la obra lascasiana —en particular, sus conexiones con la ‘suspension’ y el ‘extasis’, y con esas ‘exquisitas maneras de crueldad’ descritas por Las Casas en su opusculo—.

La destrucción de todas las cosas de H. Hiriart: un (nuevo) apocalipsis mexicano

La destruccion de todas las cosas (1992) by Hugo Hiriart belongs to a group of apocalyptic works of fiction easily detectable in the Mexican literary production between the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries. This paper aims at highlighting how the novel, describing the tragic end of the Mexican Civilization caused by an alien attack, blends together science fiction elements with references to the Spanish Conquest and its main events and characters, often adopting ? in a new perspective ? the stylistics and writing techniques of the Sixteenth-Century chronicles. Further objective of the paper is to analyze Hiriart’s reflections on the present and past condition of Mexico, which show the collapse of the revolutionary dream with irony and dark humor, and identify the decline of values in its political and cultural context as a cause of the new destruction of Mexico City.

Even Further Towards a Theory of Attribution: Advancing the Cervantine Attribution of La conquista de Jerusalén por Godofre de Bullón

Mas de 20 anos despues del descubrimiento y publicacion inicial del drama anonimo La conquista de Jerusalen por Godofre de Bullon, atribuido a Miguel de Cervantes por Stefano Arata, la obra todavia queda en la sombra de los estudios cervantinos. Profundizando en un estudio publicado en 2010 en el cual establecemos una teoria de atribucion para esta obra, este articulo pretende ampliar la cuestion al estudiarla en el mismo contexto en el que estudiamos las otras dos obras de Cervantes de la primera epoca de su escritura dramatica que aun existen hoy en dia: Los tratos de Argel y La destruccion de Numancia. Explorar la historicidad de La conquista de Jerusalen nos revela las experiencias de un cautivo y una llamada al rey espanol Felipe II a liberar esclavos cristianos en Africa. Una reliquia de la dramaturgia cervantina de los 1580 no solo ofrece datos de informacion sobre Los tratos de Argel, sino que tambien nos hace considerar la autoria de esta y la Numancia, dos obras que tambien existen en forma manuscrita anonima pero que siempre se han atribuido a Cervantes. Concluimos que Cervantes es el autor mas probable de La conquista de Jerusalen. ********** IN 2010, I PUBLISHED an article in which I created a particular theory of authorial attribution in order to address the possible Cervantine origins of the play La conquista de Jerusalen. Since that time, and building on the work of other scholars--particularly Stefano Arata and Hector Brioso Santos--I have continued the ongoing process of developing an attribution theory specifically for this play. This present essay explores the historicity of La conquista de Jerusalen in comparison with Cervantes's two extant plays from the era Los tratos de Argel and La destruccion de Numancia, reconsidering the Cervantine attribution of these two works along the way, in order to further contribute to the theoretical framework I established in my previous article. (1) Because relatively few scholars have studied this play, a quick overview of Arata's previous work would serve well at this juncture. (2) In 1989, Arata included in his catalogue of unpublished manuscripts from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries housed in the Library of the Palacio Real in Madrid the anonymous three-act play entitled La conquista de Jerusalen por Godofre de Bullon. In 1992, Arata published a transcription of the manuscript, the state of which he refers to as lamentable, along with an article in which he explores its possible Cervantine origins (10). Serving as a starting point for Arata is Cervantes's mention of La Jerusalen as one of his twenty or thirty plays written in the more classical style. The style and structure of the play belong to the mid-1580S, with the meter, versification, the use of allegorical characters, the number of characters and lines, and the detailed stage directions all bearing similarities to Tratos and Numancia. Finally, the subversive discourse that criticizes King Philip II's apparent abandonment of Christian slaves held in Northern Africa coincides with the interpretation of Cervantes's works. In a subsequent article, Arata reveals the discovery of papeles de actor, sheets used by actors to rehearse their lines, from La conquista de Jerusalen (Notas). Containing speaking parts for Godofre, Solinda, Erminia, and Teodoro, the lines number 890 in total and present three useful pieces of information. First, the sheet for Godofre de Bullon clearly states that the lines belong in the fourth act. This reinforces Arata's previous claim that the three-act play in the Palacio was most likely originally written in four acts; the number of lines in act three are double those of acts one and two. Second, Arata's discovery shows that there existed at least two versions of the play. This prompted suggestions that the complete play in the Palacio Real, which formed part of the collection of the Conde de Gondomar en Valladolid, was transcribed later from the memory of actors who played the parts, and that it was written to form part of this collection. …

“LA PATRIA CONSUMIDA”: BLOOD, NATION, AND EUCHARIST IN CERVANTES'S NUMANCIA

To Barbara with thanks Blood suffuses the best known of Miguel de Cervantes's plays, La destruccion de Numancia (1580s).1 Like much neo-Senecan drama, Numancia centers on bloodshed—violence, brutal...

Merging the Erotic and the Poetic in Vicente Aleixandre's "Espadas como labios" and "La destrucción o el amor"

Vicente Aleixandre has often described his early poetry in overtly physical terms, likening it to the voicing of a primary erotic energy linking body and world. Still, little has been written regarding Aleixandre's expressed artistic views and the erotic imagery presented in his poems. This article examines Aleixandre's depictions of the erotic in selected poems from Espadas como labios and La destruccion o el amor in light of his views about poetic creation. Through an analysis of images of sexual union, transgression, sacrifice and physical wounding we discover that for Aleixandre the erotic fusion of body and world, self and other serves as a metaphor for the destructive desire that he connects with the writing of poetry.

Representation and Interpretation of Historical Characters in Cervantes's La Numancia : Jugurtha and Viriatus

While a great number of scholars have addressed Miguel de Cervantes's dramatisation of the historical fall of Numancia to Scipio Aemilianus's (185–129 BC) Roman army in 133 BC, Golden Age studies lack a thorough investigation of his portrayal of the individual historical characters in his play La destruccion de Numancia (c. 1583). Scipio was the most prominent historical figure present, but the portrayal of the characters Jugurta and Bariato has been virtually ignored by scholarship in relation to their historical counterparts. An analysis of Jugurtha (c. 155–104 BC; King of Numidia (118–106 BC)) and Viriatus (d. 139 BC) in comparison with Cervantes's characters reveals that he intentionally manipulated the historical information available to him in order covertly to criticise Spain's imperial policies. Rome defeated both these historical figures with unjust military tactics and deceit, thus paralleling them with the collective plight of the Numantians.Mientras un gran numero de academicos ha estudiado la...

Moral Opposition to Philip in Pre-Lopean Drama

No dudo yo, senr, sino que importa regir con dura freno la milicia, y que se de al soldado rienda corta cuando el se precipita en la injusticia. La fuerza del ejercito se acorta cuando va sin arrimode justicia, antique mas le acompanen a montones mil pintadas banderas y escnadrones(Cervantes, La vv. 57-64)As the Spanish Empire expanded in the second half of the sixteenth century, King Philip II's policies began to change in a manner deemed by many to be immoral and unjust. Moralists and intellectuals of the day chose their own media to express their concern and fear of tyranny as Philip increasingly threatened to use military force to obtain the crown of Portugal in the late 1570s; moral treatises, pamphlets, epic poems, and dramatic works arose to communicate social commentary. Relatively recently, Golden Age scholars have begun to focus more attention on subversive political discourse written by dramatists preceding Lope de Vega (1562-1635) and the rise of the comcdia inteva, concentrating their efforts almost exclusively on Miguel de Cervantes's (1547-1616) La destruccion de (c. 1583). Furthermore, an increasing number of scholars has analyzed Cervantes's history play as a covert criticism of Philip II's government, rather than the overtly patriotic propaganda derived from a literal reading of the dialogue. In the 1970s, Alfredo Hermenegildo's book-length study La Numancia de Cervantes, which echoes some of his findings in his 1973 book on tragedy in the Spanish Renaissance, and Willard F. King's groundbreaking article represent two of the first challenges to the generally accepted reading of La Nitmancin as a proimperialistic work. Since then, works by the likes of Frederick A. de Armas, E. C. Graf, Michael Armstrong-Roche, Barbara Simerka, and later studies by Hermenegildo have surfaced that further validate the notion that in the play imperial rule is seen in a troublesome light (De Armas 130).While Cervantes's play certainly merits the meticulous studies it has received, it becomes apparent that La serves as only one example of a broader range of theatrical works from the 1570s and 1580s that portray similar derogatory opinions of the Spanish king. Hermenegildo reminds us that this time period contained a great amount of tension between the monarch in Castile and those on the periphery affected by his policies (Antologia 15), sentiments he expresses on other occasions (La tragedia 17; La Numancia 47; El tirano 14). A thorough investigation of the plays of Gabriel Lobo Lasso de la Vega (1559-1623), Jeronimo Bermudez (1530?-1605?), el canonigo Francisco Augustin Tarrega (1553?-1623), Cristobal de Virues (1550?-1609), Cervantes, and especially Juan de la Cueva (1543-1612), reveals two important points: there existed a very real fear of tyrannical overlordship among Golden Age Spaniards, and the critical discourse contained in these works draws attention to the notion that the reign of Philip II was by no means free from dissenting voices.1Several plays by these writers speak directly or indirectly to their creators' reservations about Philip's shift from his father's policy of Christian Imperialism to the pursuit of a more aggressive Universal Monarchy. Until the 1570s, Philip had continued Charles V's method of not expanding his European territories, at least not at the expense of other Christians. Rather, he seemed to have taken a more defensive approach; but when he claimed the Portuguese crown for himself, this signaled a change in policy and ignited great criticism from many of his subjects, including these playwrights. These writers regarded this new strategy as dangerous and unjustified, as seen by their depiction of tyranny, as well as their illustration in many instances of the consequences of either autocratic rule or ambition.2The injustice of tyranny, despotic rulers, and totalitarian regimes influenced by ambitious courtiers, were popular literary and dramatic themes in the Golden Age. …

On Infinite Decolonization

I HAVE JUST FINISHED TEACHING A CLASS ON O.S. CRIME FICTION. A few weeks ago we read Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon, and then we watched the film john Huston made on the novel, with Humphrey Bogart and Mary Astor. The film curiously makes no reference to one of the most famous passages in the book, which is when Sam Spade tells the devious but lovable Ms O'Shaugnessy the story of the man called Hitcraft. Flitcraft is the fellow who, in the middle of clean orderly sane responsible affair (64) of a life, has a freaky near-death experience that makes him confront his own mortality, and decide that, given the fact that we live in a universe that embodies death as its real, a universe of blind chance and freak events, a universe of unreason, the more attuned to reasonable life we seem to be, the more out of step with life we really are. The more in step with life the out of step; the more reasonable life, the more unreasonable it is Poor Flitcraft abandons everything, his life, his loyalties, his family, his job, his money, moves to another city, and starts a new life, only to find himself a few years later having essentially reproduced his previous life. How much of current thought in postcolonial studies mimics Flitcraft's impossible attempt to escape his own shadow? Flitcraft's attempt to decolonize his life, to rid it of everything that men at one point to be clean, orderly, sane, and responsible, ends n failure, because he restitutes a subjectivity that cannot but fall into the apparent cleanliness, orderliness, sanity, and responsibility that can only produce themselves as such at the cost of a fundamental omission: the omission of the real, as the essential out-of-stepness of itself. There can be no restitution. The thought of infinite restitution is merely delusional, when not sheer ideology. It is perhaps time to give up what Dipesh Chakrabarty a few years ago called good history (92-98). If infinite colonization cannot in any case be avoided, as Flitcraft rather comically discovers, should we not at least refuse to be colonized by the pretense of its opposite? Have we forgotten what we must mean when we say decolonization? The failure to think of the limits of decolonization is colonization itself. Bartolome Clavero's Genocidio y justicia. La destrucciOn de las Indias ayer y hey is a theoretical attempt at presenting the contemporary predicament of decolonization regarding the Latin American indigenous communities The book might show, contrary to its best intentions, how infinite or radical decolonization is not really decolonization but rather a curious form of recolonization: an apotropaic decolonization, which only decolonizes in order to better colonialize, according to what we could call, following the logic of that book, the spirit of times, or what the book terms nuestras alturas, our the alturas of a time that is wiser than older times, more enlightened, thanks to the efforts of the so-called decolonizers. The notion of our heights is a particularly blatant symptom of the presence of nomic ideology: the notion of a nomos, r of an order of the world, that subordinates the political, to follow Carl Schmitt's complex notion. (1) Clavero seems to state that we know better, we have a better order today than in the past, if we could only just follow it. Perhaps the impossible or contradictory claim for infinite decolonization, supposedly made possible today, has come to constitute something like the dominant progressive ideology of times, even if more in the academy than anywhere else: an acceptable form of leftism, and first of all acceptable, because clearly legible, to the right, which has come to take it as its enemy. But it is an easy enemy, all too easy, and, precisely, all too just. Such enemies can only become friends, as Kant would say. The truism according to which the enemy of enemy is friend is hardly reliable. By enemy here I mean the present accumulation regime that keeps so many inhabitants of the world in deep and unfair misery. …

Vicente Aleixandre's Stream of Lyric Consciousness by Daniel Murphy (review)

MLR, 98.1, 2003 225 tilious nature of its footnotes. Consequently, one of its stated objectives?to present an academic edition of two relatively unedited manuscripts?has been achieved in a manner which from the point of view of the specialist is conspicuously satisfactory. Universidad de Santiago de Compostela Juan Casas Rigall VicenteAleixandre's Stream ofLyric Consciousness. By Daniel Murphy. Lewisburg and London: Bucknell University Press for the Associated University Presses. 2001. 263 pp. $43.50. ISBN 0-8387-5464-3. Daniel Murphy's study of the poetry of Vicente Aleixandre reminds us of the elegant pleasures afforded by the close textual analysis of poetry. H. L. Boudreau is correct in his assertion in the preface to this book that Murphy's work 'might possibly be seen as the second great breakthrough into our understanding' ofAleixandre's poetry (p. 16), after Carlos Bousono's seminal La poesia de VicenteAleixandre: imagen, estilo y mundo poetico, 2nd edn (Madrid: Gredos, 1968). Murphy's originality lies in his examination of a previously understudied element of Aleixandre's poetry (using an approach which draws, in lively fashion, on recent theory): the intertextual dimen? sion. Intertextuality, for Murphy, is a perspective that examines works of art in the light of their cultural components, or intertexts. In this study of Aleixandre's La destruccion o el amor, the intertexts explored by Murphy include 'lyric' ancestors, as well as surrealism and the influential role of Freud. In Chapter 1, 'An Intertextual Tack', Murphy sketches previous approaches to Aleixandre's work (the formalist and the aesthetic) and, using intertextual theory, attempts to draw these together in the psychoanalytical. Murphy's intertextuality draws on Alastair Fowler, Harold Bloom, and Michael Riffaterre as well as Richard Dawkins's genetic 'memes' to put forward a theory of writing in which loans, debt, and imitation, whether consciously or unconsciously expressed, are germane to all writing. This theory will stand as a framework to his discussion of the genealogical intertexts present in Aleixandre's La destruccion o el amor. In Chapter 2, under the emblem of 'Poetry's Discursive Logic', Murphy sets out two models, the narrative and the generic, which provide the format for a series of illuminating intertextual reconfigurations. Thus Pedro Salinas's 'Fe mia' operates within the bounds of the liturgical models such as the Nicene Creed, while Antonio Machado's 'Las moscas' owes a debt to the narrative voice of the lyrical ode. Chapters 3, 4, and 5 examine Aleixandre's poetic texts in the light of this model of discursive structure (with particular reference to mood, voice, and genre). Particular attention is devoted to the appreciation of La destruccion o el amor as a book of poetry engaged in the task of simulating the working of the subconscious mind, a sort of lyric account of the id and superego: 'Aleixandre poetically maps this arcanum and the human in which it is contained as a panerotic world, a strictlyhuman world upon which he imposes a discursive and figurative order' (p. 147). In Chapters 6 and 7 Murphy explores Aleixandre's poetic genealogy in greater depth, analysing literary debts to Garcia Lorca and Salvador Dali (and placing Aleixandre firmlywithin the Generation of 27 poets), and, in particular, to the work of Golden Age poets. If it is true that, in reading Aleixandre, our task is to avoid taking his 'world' too literally?'in this event, one remains befuddled in the face of the Aleixandrean text' (p. 147) and its revolutionary poetic logic?still, Murphy's reading of individual poems in this study goes a long way to shedding light on what he terms Aleixandre's 'penumbral ungrammaticalities' (p. 147). Through a discussion of intertexts (both literary and theoretical) Murphy aims to show us the ways in which the familiar or 226 Reviews the accessible can be used to elucidate the opaque. In this he is successful, drawing us into Aleixandre's stunning poetic universe. University of Hull Sarah Wright Hacia unapoetica de la mirada: Mario Vargas Llosa,Juan Marse, Elena Garro,Juan Goytisolo. By Maria SilvinaPersino. BuenosAires:Corregidor. 1999. 189 pp. ISBN 950-05-1244-0. Over the past ten to fifteenyears humanities departments in the Anglo-American academic world...

Una edición crítica de la quiná sefardí de <i>La destrucción del Templo</i>

The aim of this article is to offer a critical and annotated edition of the Sephardic dirge La destruccion del Templo ('the destruction of Jerusalem Jewish Temple') based on three sources written in Hebrew characters: two chapbooks printed in 1753 and ca. 1900, and a manuscript dated to the nineteenth century.

"Limites y espejo": Linguistic Self-Consciousness in the Poetry of Vicente Aleixandre

T h e i m a g e of Vicente Ale ixandre as a relatively unsophis t ica ted c r e a t o r ha s b e e n r e m a r k a b l y tenacious . N o o n e has called in to ques t ion his mas te ry of language. T h e stylistic analyses of Carlos B o u s o n o , the a u t h o r of the first and most inf luent ia l m o n o g r a p h o n t h e poet , have prov ided ample demons t r a t ion of t he subtlety a n d p o w e r of his poetic technique. Still, few studies of his poe t ry h a v e emphas i zed his linguistic self-consciousness, his awareness of t h e verbal m e d i u m as a theoretical p r o b l e m . 1 I n a recen t s tudy, Phi l ip Silver has given voice to the widespread view tha t Aleixa n d r e is essentially naive as a poetic th inker . F o r Silver, t h e a u t h o r o f La destruccion o el amor typifies the Hispanic poe t who , like A n t aeus in G r e e k mythology, derives all of his s t r eng th f rom his ties to t h e e a r t h (La casa de Anteo 48-156). A le ixandre would thus lack t h e theore t ica l self-consciousness that is essential to t h e m o d e r n p o e t . 2