Latin American Letters Research Articles

The Estridentistas and Contemporáneos Reimagined: Debating the Legacy of the Mexican Literary Avant-Garde

The article discusses how prominent Latin American authors have reimagined the two Mexican avant-garde groups—the Contemporáneos and Estridentistas—in novels published between 1992-2011. It is obvious that the authors pay tribute to the Mexican avant-garde by casting members of the Contemporáneos and Estridentistas as lead characters in their novels. What is less obvious is the way in which the later authors stylistically borrow from the earlier avant-garde authors. Although critical tradition has tended to separate the Estridentistas from the Contemporáneos, a side-by-side reading of their 1920s prose both argues against this division and lays claim for a more prominent position for the Mexican avant-garde in Latin American letters. Between 1921 and 1929, both Estridentistas and Contemporáneos obsessively produced experimental literary self-portraits. These fragmented, pseudo-autobiographical texts serve as models for the later works from the 1990s to early 2000s, all of which paint portraits of Mexican intellectuals amidst turmoil while using literary devices that simultaneously undermine questions of authorship and the possibility of telling a coherent story. Both sets of experimental autobiographies (those from the 1920s and more recent versions) deeply question the meaning of being an intellectual in Mexico, both then and now. Considering the Estridentistas and Contemporáneos in tandem not only reveals a fuller picture of the 1920s literary scene in Mexico, but allows us to see an organic style that emerged in Mexico and influenced authors and artists throughout the Americas from the 1920s until the current day.

Latin American Adventures in Literary Journalism by Pablo Calvi

Reviewed by: Latin American Adventures in Literary Journalism by Pablo Calvi Jeffrey Peer Latin American Adventures in Literary Journalism University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019 By Pablo Calvi Many celebrated writers in the history of Latin American letters found work as journalists and first published some of their best known writing in newspapers, yet the central role of literary journalism in Latin American literary history has at times escaped the notice of North American scholars. Pablo Calvi's Latin American Adventures in Literary Journalism offers a broad look at that history, "noticing a few lines connecting authors and periods" (228) stretching from foundational texts like Domingo Sarmiento's Facundo (1845), [End Page 201] through the rise of the mass media at the turn of the twentieth century, up to the advent of the testimonio genre during the 1960s. By considering authors across two centuries, Calvi gives a big-picture view. He also takes some unexpected and entertaining turns and reveals the benefits of his hemispheric perspective and his background as a journalist and scholar of journalism studies. Calvi's first surprise is to begin with the little known story of a scandal in Chile in 1844. Francisco Bilbao (1823-1865) was just twenty-one when he published "Sociabilidad chilena," a "thirty-four-page Saint-Simonian-Rousseauian tirade against Spain's religious monarchy" (19) and the "monarchic mentality" (26) of post-colonial Chilean society. The article was attacked by ultra-Catholic conservatives and its author was charged with blasphemy, immorality, and sedition. But a growing liberal, intellectual middle class defended Bilbao, and his trial became a cause célèbre, with antagonistic crowds either supporting him or cheering for the prosecutor, who sought a long prison term and the destruction of all copies of the newspaper, to be burnt by "an executioner" (28). According to Bilbao's brother, the drama was comparable only to "a volcanic cataclysm," "the sudden collapse of a population [or] a lightning bolt striking at their feet" (25). Calvi's interpretation is instructive; "the trial signaled the emergence of an unprecedented audience—a nascent postcolonial readership" (20). In this distant episode of Chilean history, he finds the early signs of a liberal Latin American press, as well as a first example of "certain constants" (227) in the long history of the form he sets out to trace. According to Calvi, Latin American literary journalism would thereafter be political, committed to "democratic values, freedom of expression, the public good, justice, and truth" (227). The first line between authors that Calvi draws leads to a much more recognized figure. Domingo Sarmiento (1811-1888) published Facundo while in exile in Santiago, just a year after the Bilbao trial, from which, according to Calvi, he may have learned the lesson, "Do not write to the elites who oppose your views. Write to the masses who will support you" (55). Calvi emphasizes Facundo's allegorical referentiality (as an attack on Rosas in disguise), and how Sarmiento's claims of "irreproachable accuracy" (56) were subordinated to his political aims. "Sarmiento thus inaugurated Latin American literary journalism as a political-allegorical genre that obliquely refers to the present by narrating past events," he writes (59). But the next author Calvi turns to did not refer so obliquely. The crónicas of José Martí (1853-1895), especially his "Escenas norteamericanas, cartas desde Nueva York," openly advocated for Cuban independence and a pan-Hispanic 'Our America' opposed to the imperial ambitions of Washington. His crónicas set out to expose the ugly underbelly of North American economic and social progress. Calvi, a good storyteller, shows us Martí behind his desk at his office near Wall Street, with a fur rug on his feet in the winter, portraits on the wall of Victor Hugo, Karl Marx, Charles Darwin, and Simón Bolívar, eager to frustrate the machinations of US Secretary of State's James Gillespie Blaine during an ill-fated Pan-American conference in 1889. Calvi's next surprise is to turn toward Argentine journalist Juan José de Soiza Reilly (1880-1959), whose true-crime writing captivated the public imagination when Buenos Aires was undergoing dynamic urban and social expansion at the turn of the twentieth century...

Yo el Supremo, de Roa Bastos. Sobre el poder y el derecho en el mito del Doctor Francia

The importance of the relationship between literature and law, in general, is highlighted; and it is pointed out through examples set by some novels and their treatment of Rights. The text is dedicated, especially, to show how the law is manifested in Roa Bastos’s Yo el supremo, a masterpiece of Latin American letters. The famous and enigmatic Doctor Francia —theologian and jurist—, in his Perpetual Dictatorship in Paraguay, dictates and practices the Law. It expresses what the novel says about the Law and offers historic data that support what is said.

Heather ClarkRed Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath

age to a writer he has deeply admired since the 1950s. Such an opinion holds a hidden irony, however, for while Vargas Llosa is himself a staunch realist, concerned with politics and contemporary social debates in his fiction, Borges’s writings revolved around more abstract themes such as dreams, labyrinths, philosophers, and mirrors. In books such as Ficciones and El Aleph, Borges made significant contributions to philosophical and fantasy literature and, in so doing, established a rich dialogue between Latin American letters and other world literatures. The book opens with a conversation between Borges and Vargas Llosa in Paris in 1963. In it, Borges confesses his admiration for Flaubert’s novels as well as for the poetry of Verlaine and Apollinaire. However , when asked about his interest in politics, he quickly replies that politics is nothing short of “una de las formas del tedio” (a type of boredom) for him. He repeats this idea on politics in another interview from 1981, while also expressing his admiration for Joseph Conrad’s and Henry James’s novels and asserts that modernismo was Latin America’s most important contribution to Hispanic literature. For Vargas Llosa, Borges “inventó una prosa en la que habitan tantas ideas como palabras” (he invented a way of writing in which there are as many ideas as words) and authored short stories that he describes as unusual, perfect, and cerebral. He credits him for a body of work that, along with his poetry and essays, constitutes pure intellectual pleasure. At the same time, he underscores Borges’s cosmopolitanism. Indeed, Borges was an author who enjoyed speaking about French or English literature as much as he did exploring old Scandinavian myths. He shared these interests with numerous reflections on Argentine literature and culture, amid a unique style of writing that was always rigorous and intelligent , as Vargas Llosa ably comments in “Las ficciones de Borges” (The Fictions of Borges) or “Borges entre señoras” (Borges among Women). The ten pieces included in Medio siglo con Borges are highly recommended reading to review the many facets of Borges as a writer and as a public figure from the perspective of another key protagonist of contemporary Hispanic letters. In them, Vargas Llosa pays tribute to an author he has read with admiration over the years and who is arguably the most important Latin American writer of the past century. César Ferreira University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee Heather Clark Red Comet:The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath New York. Knopf. 2020. 1152 pages. OVER THE YEARS I’VE approached each new biography of Sylvia Plath hoping for a fully comprehensive account of her life that would portray her as the person of extraordinary intellectual and aesthetic accomplishment that she actually was rather than as the madwoman who killed herself. Heather Clark’s Red Comet is the book I’ve been waiting for. Meticulously researched and conceived with a sympathetic, sure-footed grasp of her subject, Clark has created a glasssmooth read of a thousand pages about Plath’s brilliant life and art. In the process she has filled in many of the spaces in the poet’s life that have remained inexplicably blank: her professor-father, Otto Plath’s, early life after immigrating to this country; the influential relationship between Plath and her psychiatrist, Ruth Beuscher; and the behind-the-scenes alliance between Plath’s mother, Aurelia, and the poet’s benefactress, Olive Higgins Prouty. Ultimately what emerges is the portrait of a highly resourceful, resilient woman—an uncommonly original thinker and artist who brought passion and discipline into remarkably taut balance in both her life and poems. Plath’s love of poetry ran deep, which Clark underscores by presenting selections from her juvenilia, something no previous biographer has done. These excerpts trace the rapid evolution of Plath’s rare lyrical gift and the singular industry and ambition with which she drove herself to express it as she matured. Clark also emphasizes Plath’s professionalism, which was unusual for a woman writer of her time. Despite regular rejections, she systematically continued to submit both poetry and fiction to women’s magazines and literary publications, and she also mastered the sophisticated...

Making Deserts, Building States

Making Deserts, Building States Emmanuel A. Velayos Larrabure Javier Uriarte. The Desertmakers: Travel, War, and the State in Latin America. New York: Routledge, 2020. 306 pages. ISBN 978-1-138-6692-8 Javier Uriarte. The Desertmakers: Travel, War, and the State in Latin America. New York: Routledge, 2020. 306 pages. ISBN 978-1-138-6692-8 In this outstanding book, Javier Uriarte studies the relationship between state consolidation, war, and deserts in travel narratives of the second half of the nineteenth century in Latin America. The Desertmakers explores the narrative construction of deserts in four different war contexts: the Paraguay War (1864–1970), the bloody conflicts during Uruguayan militarism (1876–1890), the Conquest of the Desert in Argentina (1878–1885), and the War of Canudos in Brazil (1896–1897). The book argues that travel narratives reveal that state consolidation in Latin America depended on "desert-making," that is, the desertification and emptying of territories that the state could appropriate and incorporate into the national space. The desert is a mainstream trope in postcolonial Latin American letters. In the aftermath of the independence movements, intellectuals imagined deserts as wastelands that needed to be controlled and rendered productive by nation-states. By the late nineteenth century, that control replaced the desert's trope, as concrete capitalist operations on the seized lands took over literary discourses on idle wilderness. However, Uriarte argues that the end of literary deserts did not coincide with the establishment of productive spaces, for it was first necessary to make deserts real: to turn the metaphors of emptiness into real voids. Before states appropriated the desert, it needed to be emptied, and its inhabitants decimated. According to this book, it was through internal and external wars that Latin American states transformed imagined idle territories into "desertified" spaces, into voids that could be seized and inserted in a capitalist logic of production. As Uriarte puts it, "a necessary condition for this end of the desert as perceived by the state is the creation of a new void, one that previously existed only in discourse" (2). As the desert was mainly a metaphoric construction in the first half of the nineteenth century, intellectuals did not need to travel to it to depict it: they just needed to read about it. Instead, in the second half of the century, the concrete desertification triggered by wars required that writers travel to conflict zones. Hence, the relevance of travel narratives in this book. The corpus includes both non-fictional and fictional travel accounts: Richard Burton's Letters from the Battle-Fields of Paraguay (1870), William Henry Hudson's novel The Purple Land (1885), several texts on Patagonia by Francisco Moreno, and Euclides da Cunha's Os sertões (1902). [End Page 198] The study of texts by world travelers like Burton (Chapter 1) and W. H. Hudson (Chapter 2) situates desertification and state consolidation within imperial geopolitics. State control over the territory was a tool for national sovereignty and, at the same time, an instrument to establish neocolonial relations of exploitation that benefited the British Empire. This imperial perspective is productive in discussing "desert-making" beyond the strict national lenses in previous studies on the historical and cultural meanings of deserts by Tulio Halperín Donghi and Fermín Rodríguez. Chapter 1 analyzes how Burton depicted the neocolonial relations that the British Empire sought to establish in South America, his refusal to follow British orders, and his take on the battlefields of the Paraguayan War "as deserted and ruined spaces" (46). Chapter 2 examines Hudson's novel on Uruguay as a critique against "the official effort to delimit, to control, to oversee movement" (90). The Purple Land's main character, Richard Lamb, resisted state and imperial attempts at controlling spaces and peoples' movements by embracing the "uncivilized" and unproductive rural ways of living that the militarist Uruguayan state sought to eliminate. The readings of Moreno's texts (Chapter 3) and da Cunha's prose (Chapter 4) display how the imperial logic of domination was replicated by the violence that Latin American urban elites exercised over rural territories and populations. Chapter 3 studies Moreno's writings on Patagonia in the aftermath of the Conquest...

Sangre de amor correspondido: a small secret war

Por su rareza, Sangre de amor correspondido se distingue de las otras siete novelas que publicó Manuel Puig. No sólo porque fue compuesta a partir de la grabación, transcripción y traducción de entrevistas que mantuvo en portugués con un albañil brasilero, sino, y en particular, por los interrogantes que plantea con respecto a la autoría, la economía política del sexo, la sexualidad y la lengua. Esta condensación de elementos le otorga una singularidad que puede funcionar como punto de referencia para estudiar otros textos de la época, la de 1980, mientras aún perduraba en América Latina la creencia en el poder emancipador que le asignaba a la literatura su supuesta autonomía.

Solitude and the Consent of Language: Marosa di Giorgio and Emily Dickinson

“Solitude and the Consent of Language: Marosa di Giorgio and Emily Dickinson,” examines how the Uruguayan, Marosa di Giorgio, draws from Emily Dickinson’s poetry to imagine the mind’s solitude as a recuperation of linguistic and signifying freedom within the acute context of imposed consent during the Uruguayan dictatorship. I suggest that the question at work within both poet’s oeuvre has to do with how poetic form might access the tension between what each understood as the mind’s solitude, that is, its individual interpretive processes, and the pulls of communal life, which include governmental, juridical, narrative and pedagogical systems, as they are negotiated through language. In addition to being an interdisciplinary analysis that brings together the fields of philosophy, U.S., and Latin American letters, this paper calls attention to two women writers who are rarely considered together within literary and cultural studies.

Masquerade and Social Justice in Contemporary Latin American Fiction by Helene Carol Weldt-Basson

Reviewed by: Masquerade and Social Justice in Contemporary Latin American Fiction by Helene Carol Weldt-Basson Mária Fernández-Lamarque Weldt-Basson, Helene Carol. Masquerade and Social Justice in Contemporary Latin American Fiction. U of New Mexico P, 2017. Pp. 226 ISBN 978-0-82635-815-8. Masquerade and Social Justice in Contemporary Latin American Fiction analyzes and poses critical theoretical stances on various topics related to moral rightness in the individual and collective realm. The book studies fourteen novels from authors representing various Latin American countries including Peru, Argentina, Mexico, Paraguay, Chile, Puerto Rico and Cuba. This is a fine selection of Latin American Spanish speaking writers. Structurally, Masquerade is divided into five chapters with an introduction and a conclusion. The introduction offers an overview of the general theme of masquerade/carnival in critical theory mentioning canonical ideologists on the topic such as Bakthin’s Rabelais and [End Page 149] His World (1965) and more recent ones such as Deborah Bells’ Masquerade: Essays on Tradition and Innovation Worldwide (2015). The author also includes the works of Latin American critics, which adds the regional theoretical component to strengthen her arguments. Often times, scholars in the field of Latin American literary criticism tend to omit or ignore the names of the very best thinkers in Latin American letters. Ben Sifuentes, Vek Lewis and José Ismael Gutiérrez, who work on transvestism in Latin America, are some of the scholars mentioned and quoted in the volume. Each chapter discusses a specific idea on how masquerade operates as a vehicle of justice. Chapter 1 introduces the notion of distributive justice in the social arena. In order to contextualize the concept, three contemporary novels are studied in the chapter: La comparsa (2009) by Sergio Galindo, El paraíso en la otra esquina (2003) and Travesuras de una niña mala (2006) by Mario Vargas Llosa. All three works, according to the author, give voice to and unveil the unheard or disenfranchised economic disadvantaged societal groups. In chapter 2, equality is rooted in the concept of ethical feminism. To exemplify this idea, the autor analyzes Allende’s Hija de la fortuna (1999), Antonio Benítez-Rojo’s Mujer en traje de batalla (2001), Marcela Serrano’s Nuestra señora de la soledad (1999) and Sara Sefchovich’s La señora de los sueños (1994). Drawing upon postmodern ideas of the decentering of settled and internalized constructed “truths,” an ethic of care is presented in the novels as a human trait and not an exclusive “feminine” one. The idea of love is also introduced and discussed in the works as the universal thread to unite individuals regardless of the gender of choice. Echoing Third Wave Feminism ideas, ethical feminism is set in the novels as a continuum and a human and rightful value more than a gender-linked trait. Chapter 3 consists of Isabel Allende’s Zorro (2005) and Carmen Boullosa’s Duerme (1994) analyses on what the author calls postcolonial structural justice. In general, the chapter triggers the discussion on the voiceless colonized subjects and its ways of disrupting the status quo as represented in these novels. Chapter 4 founds its examination in the political arena and how transitional justice is depicted in two Argentinian novels: Novela negra con argentinos (2004) by Luisa Valenzuela and Ariel Dorfmann’s Máscara (1988). Through the lenses of Angus Fletcher’s theory of allegory, the author observes that both works use the thematic feature of masquerade to articulate and bring about a reflection of transitional justice. In chapter 5 factual events as themes in three novels are the pretext for a “historical justice” analysis. Social moments such as: slavery, the French invasion of Mexico, and Alfredo Stroessner’s dictatorship in Paraguay, are situated as fictional spaces in the novels. The protagonists, physically traumatized from an abuse of power, attempt to use masquerade as a form of reaching justice. The volume tackles a critical study focused on equality, and its various representations, in Latin American contemporary literature. It takes the stance of literature as a political and social weapon as well as its ethical and moral responsibility. Reading and writing as a political act is imperative in...

The Theater of Revisions in the Hispanic Caribbean by Katherine Ford

Reviewed by: The Theater of Revisions in the Hispanic Caribbean by Katherine Ford Camilla Stevens Ford, Katherine. The Theater of Revisions in the Hispanic Caribbean. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. 219 pp. The Theater of Revisions in the Hispanic Caribbean by Katherine Ford argues that twentieth-century playwrights from the Spanish-speaking Caribbean repeatedly return to previous narratives to rewrite them, a process that contributes to the construction of national and regional identities. Ford's literary and cultural study usefully places in dialogue twelve dramatic texts written and performed between 1941 and 1994 in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico and frames this wide-ranging corpus with theories on adaptation, intertextuality, palimpsest, and archive. Only a handful of the plays have received notable criticism, thus the book constitutes a welcome contribution to Latin American theatre studies. Ford's assertion that inherent in all writing is the act of revision and that the collective nature of the theatre endeavor uniquely positions it for the analysis of multiple forms of revision—whether it be the theme of rewriting mythical narratives or the process of producing the written script, or the activity of rehearsal and feedback from the audience—is convincingly exemplified throughout the book. The introduction (chapter 1) outlines the literary theories (Derrida, Genette, Hutcheon, Kristeva, Cixous) that support her study's examination of the role of rewriting in Hispanic Caribbean theatre. Importantly, Ford also touches upon theatre and performance theories proposed by Boal, Brecht, and Taylor, as well as key literary studies of the archival, foundational, and memorial impulse in Latin American letters (González Echevarría, Sommer, Quiroga). Finally, the introduction historically and culturally contextualizes the act of rewriting in the region by discussing the scripts of the Spanish Reconquista, the conquest of the New World, and the invention of new myths such as the Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre. The study is organized in chapters that address collective creation and audience feedback, ancient Greek theatre, Christianity, and national historical myths. Chapter 2 considers collaborative rewriting in three published versions of El paraíso recobrao (1978) by the Cuban group Teatro Escambray. Along with the dramatic texts, notes and a transcript of the dialogue between the theatre practitioners and the community help Ford show how revising and rewriting in this case serves to hone a pro-revolutionary message meant to guide an isolated community that was slow to integrate with the Revolution of 1959. Chapter 3 examines the influence of Greek theatre in the most widely acclaimed Cuban, Puerto Rican, and Dominican works included in the book: Electra Garrigó (1941) by Virgilio Pinera, La pasión según Antígona Pérez (1968) by Luis Rafael Sánchez, and Lisístrata odia la política: obra teatral en tres actos inspirada en un tema de Aristófanes (1981) by Franklín Domíngez. Ford posits that the authors appropriate ancient Greek theatre to make visible their local theatre tradition's place in the Western tradition while at the same time challenging the canon of global theatre by expanding it. In chapter 4 the author turns to the use [End Page 226] of Christian myths and imagery and offers readings of La noche (1994) by Abilio Estévez (Cuba), ¡Hágase la mujer! (1987) by Juan Carlos Campos (Dominican Republic/Spain), and De tanto caminar: Auto alegórico en tres cuadros (1961) by Piri Fernández (Puerto Rico) that highlight how the recurring theme of doubt destabilizes the preponderance of Catholicism in the cultures of the Hispanic Caribbean. Biblical stories and religious symbols are revised in these plays to challenge certainty and generate an interrogative space for their audiences. In similar fashion, in chapter 5, revisioning nineteenth-century historical figures and myths in La invasión (1970) by Manuel Méndez Ballester (Puerto Rico), Plácido (1981) by Gerardo Fulleda León (Cuba), and Andrómaca (1983) by Ivan García Guerra (Dominican Republic) facilitates reflection on the interplay of race, gender, and political status in the collective identity of these nations. The book ends with a sixth chapter on the rewriting and reception of Abelardo Estorino's plays, La dolorosa historia del amor secreto de don José Jacinto...

Mother Earth, Earth Mother: Gabriela Mistral as an Early Ecofeminist

Historians have noted that male bureaucrats and natural resource experts tended to dominate early twentieth-century national and hemispheric conservationist movements in Latin America, but a constellation of female activists, notable among them Gabriela Mistral, strengthened conservationism in the cultural sphere. Capitalizing on her leadership in Pan-Americanism, transnational feminist networks, and cutting-edge teaching, Mistral functioned throughout her career as an advocate for conservationism, gendering the natural environment in strategically essentialist ways. Important tropes throughout her poetry, Nature and Mother Earth became specific themes in Mistral’s journalistic prose. Here, Mistral blended conservationism with anti-imperialism, arguing that Mother Earth was threatened both by man’s failure to care for her and by predatory imperialists. Environmental stewardship also played a central role in her Pan-American initiatives and complimented the “official” Pan-American Conservation Movement of the interwar period. Mistral’s de facto ecofeminism is echoed in Latin American women’s writing of the 1920s, 30s, and 40s, suggesting that Nature represented an alternate sphere for women beyond the urban manifestations of modernization. The gathering of female voices around the gendered image of Mother Nature also represents a corpus of early environmental prophets in Latin American letters and culture.

The Dialectics of Irreverence and Commemoration in Roque Dalton’s Un libro rojo para Lenin

I read Roque Dalton’s posthumous work Un libro rojo para Lenin as a model to help us recover the urgency of the revolutionary legacy of the 1960s in Latin American letters. Through Dalton we can learn how to inherit this tradition amidst the triumphant discourses of the end of history, the dawning of globalization, and the need to reinvent the Left after the collapse of real socialist projects. I analyze the concepts of memory, commemoration, legacy, and inheritance understood in the context of Dalton’s irreverent and revolutionary conception of history. In order to inherit Lenin’s thought, Dalton establishes a critical distance from it and consciously recovers the moment in Lenin’s writings about the revolutionary struggle, before Lenin has come to power. This moment of revolutionary potential embodies the utopian spirit that Dalton wishes to “translate” to the Latin American revolution. This legacy that Dalton intends to recover is found in a book that seems to erase the boundaries between the political pamphlet and poetry. This radical project is characteristic of his continued attempt to reconcile the political vanguard with his unflinching commitment to the aesthetic avant-garde. This tension between the aesthetic and political is evident in Dalton’s proposed solution to inheriting Lenin’s legacy in Latin America: along with the work of mourning, we must employ the work of irony. Irony will establish the necessary critical distance to inherit Lenin in a Latin American context.

On the Dark Side of the Archive: Nation and Literature in Spanish America and the Turn of the Century (review)

Reviewed by: On the Dark Side of the Archive: Nation and Literature in Spanish America and the Turn of the Century Jaime Hanneken González Espitia, Juan Carlos. On the Dark Side of the Archive: Nation and Literature in Spanish America and the Turn of the Century. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 2010. 250 pp. Drawing on the imaginative force brought to the study of Latin American letters by the grand-scale view of regional literary modernity as an archive— eminently represented in Roberto González Echevarría’s Myth and Archive and Doris Sommer’s Foundational Fictions—On the Dark Side of the Archive seeks both to extend and to reorient its critical purchase through the lens of what González Espitia calls the carnero, the titular dark side of the archive. The carnero, as the physical and mnemonic place where unwanted books are tossed, composes the constitutive outside of its visible counterpart, the “open archive” (16), simultaneously facilitating and betraying its purported self-sufficiency. Functioning like a Derridean supplement, the carnero forces us to appreciate the ways archives enact an endless self-reconstitution across their spectrum of visible and invisible spaces, where the latter appear spectrally in the gaps of the former and come (im)possibly to fill them, sending today’s open archive to the carnero so that the archival process is constantly begun anew. The book’s six chapters challenge the archive of national romance popularized by Sommer through examination of its supplementary material, the a-foundational fictions of decadent literature from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. (Chapter six inverts the direction of investigation by studying the [End Page 357] more current work of Fernando Vallejo, which is part of the open archive yet also a-foundational.) The inscription of these texts in the carnero is thematic, stylistic, and historic at once: not only do they undermine heteronormative national foundation through topics of incest, venereal disease, necrophilia, psychedelic hallucination, zoophilia, apocalyptic miscegenation, and vampirism; they also reflect the shuffling of texts in and out of the open archive according to the status of their authors, some of whom, like Colombian José María Vargas Vila or Peruvian Clemente Palma, had popular readerships yet have always been banished to the carnero, while others, like José Martí, Horacio Quiroga, and Vallejo, are refashioned for the open archive through a narrative of authorial maturation, separating the wheat of more acclaimed works from the chaff of their anomalous early production. The chapters are concerned to trace the appearance of the supplemental lack of these authors’ oeuvres—what “begs for completion” through prevalent contemporary literary modes but also makes silent claims about their inadequacies (20)—in the vicissitudes of their decadent mood, the set of tropes and discourses positioned against the grain of mainstream ideas about cultural nation-building. Given the multilayered focus of the analytical apparatus laid out in the introductory chapter, the thematic chapters face the task of balancing contextualization of literary-cultural and geopolitical historic factors with close reading of decadent and a-foundational elements in each of the texts in question, and rejoining all of these threads to the main discussion of the archive’s supplemental lack. All the chapters actively illuminate some of these vectors of the archive’s morphology, but they manage less often to highlight them all equally as a cohesive whole. Chapter two, for example, probes the archival trajectory of Martí’s Amistad funesta/ Lucía Jerez for clues to the author’s changing ideas about the place of women in Spanish American nations. The novel, first published under a pseudonym in a New York periodical, officially joined Martí’s oeuvre under the title Lucía Jerez after critics discovered its true authorship: in the development of the title character, argues González Espitia, we can read the advancement of Martí’s ambivalence toward strong, sexually possessive feminine figures who counter the traditionally accepted role of women as decorative fodder for national progeny. In the original Amistad funesta, the paranoid murderess Lucía clearly personifies a threat of feminine power to the health of new national bodies, but in the subsequent archival inscription of the tale her character reveals a more positive energy...

Disorienting the Furniture: The Transgressive Journalism of Alfonsina Storni and Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Drawing on the journalistic prose of two major literary figures of early-twentieth-century Argentina and the U.S., this article breaches cultural, national, and geographical frontiers by comparing the discursive gestures through which Alfonsina Storni and Charlotte Perkins Gilman re-appropriate for themselves the canonical genre of essay-writing to advance their feminist agendas. By undermining the presuppositions underlying so-called feminine publications of their time, both women carry out an intriguing disarticulation of the classic private/public divide that empowers their female readers to conceive of female subjectivity in new and innovative ways. Almost a mythic figure in the world of Latin American letters, Alfonsina Storni has achieved world renown as Argentina’s most famous “poetess of love,” thus obscuring her substantial contributions to Argentinean periodical literature. Even though Charlotte Perkins Gilman has become one of the most influential figures in the history of American First-Wave Feminism, that reputation is largely founded on her feminist fiction and her book Women and Economics, while her journalistic accomplishments have received considerably less attention. The transnational dialogue between these two writers conjured up in this article unearths this more or less neglected corpus to reveal the ways in which both subverted traditional definitions of gender through a transgressive use of discursive spaces heavily coded as “feminine” by patriarchal ideology.

Charting the Pluriverse

Page 12 American Book Review Charting the Pluriverse Joseph D. Haske This ambitious collection highlights over fiftyfive years of obras maestras from “Nicaragua’s preeminent poet after Rubén Darío,” and one of Latin America’s most well-known and accomplished poets throughout America and Europe; Ernesto Cardenal has been published in over twenty languages, and his life’s work has certainly warranted his place of distinction in LatinAmerican letters. Aworthy tribute to this living legend, Pluriverse boasts the English translations of some of Cardenal’s best verse in four unique sections, arranged in chronological order. The collection begins with Zero Hour, poetry from 1949–59. The initial works of this section evoke the turbulent events of Nicaragua’s history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and often refer to historical figures like William Walker in poems like “With Walker in Nicaraugua.” In these poems, Cardenal employs vivid imagery to convey messages of an often overtly political nature. Editor Jonathan Cohen states that this time period reflects a crucial turning point in Cardenal’s poetic style, as the poet, during his time at Columbia University in New York, “immersed himself in the work of US poets.” Cardenal’s burgeoning concern for the sociopolitical situation in his home country coupled with the influence ofAmerican poets, particularly modernists such as Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams, allow the poet to convey local concerns, past and present, in a uniquely universal manner, while remaining grounded in the roots of the subject matter and its personal impact. “With Walker in Nicaragua” displays the subtle influence of early-twentieth-century American imagist poetry embedded in wistful Whitmanesque diatribes: What scenes return to my memory now! A grey wave that comes blotting out the hills and a muffled sound of flood waters rushing through the jungle and the howls of monkeys on the opposite bank and the heavy, metallic beating of raindrops on the tin roofs and the people running to take in the clothes from the ranch porches and later the grey wave and the muffled sound moving off and once again the silence…. The best such work in this section sustains an intense emotional reaction to the deadly serious subject matter through such lucid nature imagery and concise diction. Near the end of the section, Cardenal’s “Epigrams ” marks an abrupt stylistic and thematic shift from the previous poems. Cardenal employs raw, passionate language and stark, candid description that skillfully evokes simultaneous pain and pleasure, as the speaker explores the complexity of human relationships and boasts the power of the pen: I give you these verses, Claudia, because they belong to you. I’ve written them plainly so you can understand them. They’re just for you, but if they bore you, maybe one day they’ll spread, all through Spanish America… and if you also scorn the love that wrote them, other women will dream of this love that is not meant for them. And, perhaps you’ll see, Claudia, that these poems (written to court you) inspire in other living couples who read them the kisses that the poet did not inspire in you. The brief, almost lyrical verses of “Epigrams” demonstrate some of the typically subtle distinctions between Cardenal and American contemporaries with similar influences, such as his classmate at Columbia University,Allen Ginsberg; while the modernist movement in the US and Britain essentially mandated the absence of romantic elements in verse, especially for the willing acolytes of Pound, aspects of the romantic have often lingered on in Latin American poetry. Even among self-proclaimed modernistas, the seemingly contradictory amalgamation of hope and despair has surfaced with some frequency both stylistically and through thematic concerns. All that is known to humanity is in a state of decline, the world fragmented, yet somehow, a sense of hope lingers on; this sense of optimism is often manifested in LatinAmerican verse through elements of the spiritual, a connection to a higher power that transcends all human concerns and can be revealed through the works of poets such as Cardenal. In this regard, Cardenal skillfully incorporates the best of the likes of Pound and Williams into his work while upholding a certain “tradition” of...

Songs of Life and Hope/Cantos de vida y esperanza by Rubén Darío

R e v i e w s Ruben Dario, Son^s of Life and Hope/Cantos de vida yesperanza. Ed. and Trans. Will Derusha and Alberto Acereda. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004. 262 pp. As Will Derusha and Alberto Acereda elaborate in their extensive introduc¬ tion to this book, the poetry of Nicaraguan Ruben Dario (1867-1916) pres¬ ents, in asingle package, all of the most nettlesome problems that can con¬ front the translator. On one hand, Dario’s fundamental importance to Latin American letters, and his impact on poetry in Spanish, demands atranslation thatisaccessibletoanyonewiththeremotestinterestinLatinAmericancul¬ ture. Such potential readers should include, ideally, those who know litde Spanish,havelittleexperiencewithmodernistapoetry,andarenotsteeped in the political and cultural conflicts of the era. On the other hand, Dario s intense engagement with linguistic invention, literary history, and contem¬ porary conflict are precisely what makes his poetry so intimidating to so many.DerushaandAceredahaveachievedoutstandingsuccessatgrappling withthesedifficultiestoproduceatranslationofDario’smostrespected work that is highly readable yet far from simplistic or transparent. The volume is Dario’s compendium of fifty-nine poems, all written aroundtheturnofthelastcentury,originallypublishedin1905.Itisdivid¬ ed into three parts very unequal in length, comprising poems also extreme y variedinlength,tone,style,andtheme.Together,thepoemsnotonlygivea strong sense of Dario’s prodigious talents at crafting innovative verse, but alsoadoptperspectivesthatrangefromsweepingpronouncementsonthe world around him to profound explorations of ahighly troubled soul and mind.Thetranslatorspresentthesepoemsinabilingualeditionwiththe authoritativeversionsoftheSpanishoriginalsandtheirtranslationonfacing pages.OneofthemoreremarkableaspectsofDerushaandAcereda’swor isthattheysucceedinconveyingboththebreadthofthepoet’srangean theintensityofhisfeelingandjudgmentwithoutseemingcontriveor ridiculous. , , . Thisisnoteasilymanaged.Asthetranslatorsareaware,Darfosstye anderuditionareatoddswithpresent-daytastesandinterests.Eventhe mostsympatheticreaderscanfindDarfotobe,bytoday’sstandards,meo dramatic,pedantic,orevenmaudlin.Derushaand Aceredasolvethisprob¬ lembyrefusingto“adapt”Dario’ssingularsensibilities,whicharesooften specifictohistimeandplace.Instead,theytranslatemanyofDario’speculi¬ aritiesdirectly:hislearnedvocabulary,hisabstrusereferencestoartisticand mythologicaltraditions,andhishyperboleareallrenderedfaithfullyand Intertexts, Vol. 9, No. 2©2005 Texas Tech University Press 1 7 4 I N T E R T E X T S with no apology, yet with aclarity that allows for seamless and natural read¬ ing. The success of this translation, however, really is owing to two strategies that could only be realized by craftsmen who are deeply appreciative of the elements and techniques of poetry. One of these strategies is the translation of Dario’s wonderful, often experimental, rhythmic patterns. In their intro¬ duction, the translators explain these patterns at length, elucidating the essential differences between rhythmic structures in Spanish and English and revealing how, in translating Dario, they relied on English rhythms that pro¬ duce analogous effects rather than trying to reproduce Darfo’s effects. The other key strategy is the translators’ willingness to mine modern English usage to express ideas and emotions from the original Spanish that, to less adept wordsmiths, would seem impossible to render without being precious, dated, or contrived. One lovely, if almost too obvious, example is the title of the last poem in the volume, “Lo fatal,” which expresses the agony of living uncertainly in the face of the certainty of death. The title, which in Spanish is aword play encapsulating both the theme and emotion of the poem, is ren¬ dered expertly as “What Gets You.” To quote Derusha and Acereda regard¬ ing their own efforts, their translation “is not an attempt to rewrite Darfo in English but rather to suggest in English as best we can what and how Dario wrote in Spanish” (3). The poems themselves range from captivating and charming, to clever and provocative, to puzzling and overwhelming. Part of Dario’s immense success—it is probably hard to capture just how adored he was by literati of the time or how derided by his later detractors—owes to the enormity of his personality and his boldness in expressing that personality. In that respect he is comparable to Walt Whitman, except that his presence is even stronger and his intellectual reach even greater. Ahallmark of the modernista poets, of whom Darfo was the undisputed leader, was their profession of artistic “sincerity” and their fierce defense of poetry as avibrant and invaluable form of expression to be simultaneously enshrined and tested. Accordingly, Dario’s poem “Cyrano in Spain,” honoring the first production of Cyrano de Bergerac in Madrid, is both apaean to the play and acelebration of the poetic arts. At the same time, the poem gauges the limits of language’s abili¬ ty to express the ineffable: Art is the glorious victor. It is Art that defeats space and time...

Art and Anger: Essays on Politics and the ImaginationImagining Columbus: The Literary Voyage

Art and Anger: Essays on Politics and the ImaginationImagining Columbus: The Literary Voyage

Writing Paris: Urban Topographies of Desire in Contemporary Latin American Fiction

Writing Paris: Urban Topographies of Desire in Contemporary Latin American Fiction. By Marcy E. Schwartz. Albany: State U of New York P, 1999. xiii + 182 pp. While this first book by Rutgers University professor Marcy Schwartz has much to recommend it, it is also an object lesson in the pitfalls of academic publishing. Schwartz's topic is a rich one with a substantial presence in Latin American letters: Paris as a bohemian Mecca, yearned-for destination of the lettered American pilgrim, and constantly mutable literary construct. She focuses on two Argentinean writers (Julio Cortazar, arguably as much a Parisian as a porteno, and Luisa Futoransky, also an adoptive Parisian) and two Peruvian writers (Manuel Scorza and Alfredo Bryce Echenique). Schwartz makes some good points, but you can't help feeling that careful editing would have produced a document that was half as long and twice as coherent. Unfortunately, many academic presses leave this up to the author, always the person least qualified to edit her own work. In this case, the resulting text is laden with redundancies, vague or syntactically unsound statements, and imprecise or incorrect usage (e.g. illiciting for eliciting). Schwartz's arguments (which are quite interesting) are obscured by constructions like material substance of this example demonstrates the physicality of language that manifests in cultural objects, and Cortazar's Parisian maps circumscribe displaced Latin Americans who come to terms with their own transcultural identification in the heart of France's defeated empire. Loosely construed literary jargon weighs down her prose: what exactly are architectural tropes of erotic interstitiality? Quotes dangle and assertions such as Like the elusive clients of whoring predators [??], words in these stories resist enclosure in strict paradigms and, like the postcolonial subject, seek refuge in the interstice collapse into unintelligibility. Despite these shortcomings, Schwartz's book is worth reading. The introduction sets up her central point: that the idealized Paris that appears in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Latin American writing suffers a radical transformation starting with the regional novel and continuing to the present. Paris the center of revolutionary activity has become a bastion of bourgeois, capitalist, and imperial interests, and Paris the source of inspiration, aesthetic legitimization and sexual freedom has become a decadent cesspool plagued by racism, libertinism and class warfare. Above all, Paris reflects evolving Latin American attitudes about its relationship to modern European practices and ideologies: capitalism, Marxism, liberalism and especially cultural imperialism. Schwartz could have strengthened her argument here by considering European Marxist thinkers like Gramsci, Adorno and Benjamin, as well as the influence of Spenglerian thought on major Latin American writers like Alejo Carpentier, in whose work Paris also looms large. …

Twentieth-Century Latin American Literary Studies and Cultural Autonomy

Twentieth-Century Latin American Literary Studies and Cultural Autonomy

Marriage in the Short Stories of Rosario Castellanos

Prominent in Latin American letters and a leading voice in early Mexican feminism, Rosario Castellanos goes beyond the limits of conventional feminist questions to more universal problems that transcend gender and are concerned with society, language, and creativity. Critical inquiry into her work has concentrated primarily on her feminism and the image of woman, mostly in her novels and in the collection Album de familia. Quite a few of these studies point to the importance and centrality of the image of marriage in her work (Franco 31; Fiscal, La imagen 51; Fiscal, Identidad y lenguaje 27), without examining it from the point of view of linguistic and literary technique. Since we have only one significant study of her short stories,1 I propose to treat the topic of marriage in these narratives and in the process analyze the dialogic nature of these works. In my emphasis on this approach, I have greatly benefitted from M.M. Bakhtin's theories. The notions of the other, of dialogue, and of the fundamental nature of

The Emperor's Kites: A Morphology of Borges' Tales , and: Textual Confrontations: Comparative Readings in Latin American Literature , and: Gabriel García Márquez: New Readings , and: García Márquez and Latin America (review)

Reviewed by: The Emperor's Kites: A Morphology of Borges' Tales, and: Textual Confrontations: Comparative Readings in Latin American Literature, and: Gabriel García Márquez: New Readings, and: García Márquez and Latin America Pamela Finnegan Mary Lusky Friedman . The Emperor's Kites: A Morphology of Borges' Tales. Durham: Duke UP, 1987. 225 pp. $22.50. Alfred J. MacAdam . Textual Confrontations: Comparative Readings in Latin American Literature. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987. 106 pp. $19.95. Bernard McGuirk and Richard Cardwell . Gabriel García Márquez: New Readings. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987. 230 pp. $39.50. Alok Bhalla , ed. García Márquez and Latin America. New York: Envoy, 1987. 186 pp. $22.50. Critical and popular acclaim of twentieth-century Latin American letters focuses on Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel García Márquez, the two authors most generally credited with awakening interest abroad in the literature of the Spanish-speaking Western hemisphere. The books reviewed here corroborate the far-reaching influence of these two authors. The Emperor's Kites: A Morphology of Borges' Tales by Mary Lusky Friedman identifies imbedded in each of Borges' tales the ur narrative, "a story that coexists with the plot but does not necessarily coincide with it." To distinguish between these two texts, the individual story and the paradigmatic text, is analogous to Freud's differentiation "between the manifest and latent content of a dream." Lusky Friedman proceeds by first identifying the ur narrative, explicating its [End Page 263] presence in a representative number of Borges' texts, then turning to the questions of how the ur narrative evolved in Borges' A Universal History of Infamy. Next, other of the ur narrative's antecedents are sought in Borges' nonnarrative work, and, finally, the author hypothesizes that the process of mourning for his father provided Borges the emotional experience and state of mind out of which the ur narrative was metamorphosed into the mature texts of Ficciones and The Aleph, disguising "the motif of oedipal strife" and heightening "the irreality of his tales." The Emperor's Kites is a well-researched, well-argued study that deserves critical attention. Lusky Friedman's thoughts on Oedipal strife lead her to consider at length two crucial aspects of Borgean technique: derealization of experience and impoverishment of the individual (the deemphasizing of personal circumstance). The latter topics as well as Lusky Friedman's discussions of the evolution of violence into mystery, the relationship between loss of selfhood, punishment, and mirrors; the development of the double; Borges' postulation of reality (verisimilitude); and other metaphors basic to the Borges oeuvre help, as well as challenge, the reader to decipher Borges' narrative world. Although Lusky Friedman couches in tentative terms her hypothesis that Borges' genius and the vitality of his work are a product of mourning, her recapitulation of Borges' aesthetic, philosophical, and literary preferences is certain and forceful. The only concern one might voice is that in spite of Borges' known playfulness and wryness, Lusky Friedman always reads Borges seriously, taking him at his word. Nevertheless, her scholarship is commendable, the volume has ample documentation with a Borges bibliography, and the physical volume is attractive and nearly error-free. Textual Confrontations: Comparative Readings in Latin American Literature, although not about Borges, is informed throughout by his presence. MacAdam's presentation approximates a reading of Latin American literature through the filter of Borges' oeuvre. MacAdam's goal is to connect Latin American literature, "an eccentic branch of the Western tradition," with British and American literature "in order to reaffirm Latin America's place in that tradition and to explore those factors that render Latin American literature unique." He concludes that eccentricity in any Western national literature makes manifest that the Western tradition is "vast and growing," that Latin American writers share the belief that "literature ought to raise more questions than it resolves," and that Latin American writers share the belief that writers "are entitled to express their moral concerns in their writing, and critics ought to point out those concerns." In spite of the latter assertion, MacAdam elsewhere dismisses history-bound criticism as ignoring the artistic qualities of the text while simultaneously averring that Latin American reality "has...