Spanish Writers Research Articles

La imagen de la ciudad de Estambul, entre realidad, metáfora y sueño

This article aims to show how it is possible to transform a real urban space into a metaphor, an oneiric space, or a simple literary image. Spanish and Latin American contemporary writers and poets, linked to a major literary tradition, set their works in Istanbul because of its history, its charming natural landscapes, its complicated urban layout, and its ethnic, cultural, and religious mixing. Their strategies oscillate between the descriptions of the city's rivers, palaces, sunsets, local people, and neighborhoods in realistic terms and the capacity to create an imaginary and metaphoric city that has no relationship with the historical place most tourists visit every year. The Turkish city has achieved a special renown in recent decades in Spanish and Latin American literature due to the novels, short stories, and poems written by authors whose purpose is to involve their readers in an irrational atmosphere made of dreams, parallel realities, and imagined spaces.

THE DISCOMFORT OF BEING A TEACHER IN COLOMBIA

This article is a reflection that arises from everyday school activities. It aims to identify some discomforts experienced in school and in society that affect the daily work of teachers, inside and outside the education center, documented through literary, educational, and film texts. It also aims to describe the vicissitudinous relationship of teachers with public and private entities, for instance, in health service. It seeks to expose anxieties and the complexity of tasks that are assigned to teachers and schools today, distanced from contemporary pedagogical sense. It is an approach to the once-used similes of lamented emergencies and forced silences, affirmed in the 21st century. The article examines the metaphor of the dragon hunter, the Sunday afternoon syndrome, and Hadrian’s syndrome with respect to the tense relations with family, colleagues, students, society, the State, and with learning environments. The content of the paper is not idealized; it could seem very pessimistic, but, paraphrasing the Spanish writer Antonio Gala, the article could say: “I am not pessimistic. I am a well-informed optimist.”

Representing Tihó-Mérida in Colonial Yucatán: Maya and Spanish Considerations of a Colonial Capital

This paper considers how the Spanish colonial capital of Mérida, Yucatán, which was built upon the abandoned Maya ceremonial center of Tihó, was depicted and referenced in colonial era drawings and texts. In these materials I examine how the city was represented as the new cultural and economic center of Yucatán and as a location that processed a vital Maya past. In approaching these themes, my essay engages with current academic and theoretical scholarship that has explored Tihó-Mérida’s multicultural identity. I contribute to this scholarship by bringing together disparate materials not often discussed in accord with one another, specifically Spanish chronicles, the 1581 drawing of the Guardianship of Motul, the drawings from the book of the Chilam Balam of Chumayel, and passages from other books of the Chilam Balams. Spanish and Maya informants created these textual and visual objects that express related but differing ideas about Tihó-Mérida’s importance in Yucatán. Spanish writers often are concerned with affirming the city’s status, while Maya sources either confirm the capital’s authority over Yucatán or attempt to align with or reinstate the capital’s power. In this paper I examine how indigenous agency was enacted in textual and pictorial references to Tihó to reveal some of the ways in which the Maya responded to the social unrest brought about by Spanish colonization.

Theorizing Iberian Studies

Theorizing Iberian Studies Robert Patrick Newcomb In recent years, a series of proposals have been made with the aim of radically reconceptualizing the discipline of peninsular literary and culture studies (see Moraña, Resina, Santana). These proposals have in turn led scholars interested in peninsular literatures and cultures to reimagine the field from an Iberian perspective, as a means to recognize the national and linguistic diversity of the Iberian Peninsula. This diversity has too often been obscured by the implicit or explicit monolingualism of Hispanism and Lusofonia as disciplinary paradigms for the study of the language, literature, and culture of the former Spanish and Portuguese colonial empires. The growing number of scholars invested in Iberian Studies have instead asked how peninsular literary and cultural studies might be reimagined, and reinvigorated, by placing the Spanish and Portuguese canons into critical dialogue with each other, and with Galician, Catalan, Basque/Euskadi, and Latin American and North African immigrant writers, cultural actors, texts, and traditions. Major Iberian Studies symposia have been held in recent years at the University of Lisbon (2011), Stanford University (2011), The Ohio State University (2013), and UC Santa Barbara (2013). And Iberian Studies working groups have been formed in Europe (Project DIAA—Diálogos Ibéricos e Ibero-Americanos), the US Midwest (Midwest Iberian Studies Group), and California (UC Comparative Iberian Studies Working Group). It is within this context that Robert Patrick Newcomb of the University of California, Davis, on behalf of the MLA Division on Luso-Brazilian Language and Literature, and in collaboration with the AATSP, convened a panel discussion on “Theorizing Iberian Studies,” which took place during the afternoon of Friday, January 9, 2015 at the MLA Convention in Vancouver. The panel reacted to a discrepancy recently noted by Santiago Pérez Isasi and Ângela Fernandes, who observe, “The field of Iberian Studies, which could be defined as the methodological consideration of the Iberian Peninsula as a complex, multilingual cultural and literary system, has known an exponential development in the last years; however, it still lacks solid theoretical and methodological reflections”(1). The Theorizing Iberian Studies panel brought together researchers who have actively contributed to the ongoing Iberian Studies debate, and who approach this emerging field from a variety of geographic, disciplinary, and linguistic perspectives. The panel’s first speaker, Mario Santana (University of Chicago), delivered comments titled “Besides Theory: Critical Practices in Iberian Studies.” Santana noted that recent conferences and symposia have generated discussion on the (perceived) need to have a “theory” of Iberian Studies. However, rather than ‘theories,’ Santana argued that what is urgently needed are theoretically informed ‘practices’ that would facilitate the expansion of material archives, which in turn may facilitate the discovery and articulation of critical problems relevant to the field. Santana’s comments focused specifically on one of these areas in need of exploration, namely the role of translation in the constitution of literary inter-relations in the Iberian Peninsula. The second speaker, Jorge Pérez (University of Kansas), asked, “¿De qué hablamos cuando hablamos de Estudios Ibéricos?” Pérez contended that a federal model of cultural coexistence within the Iberian Peninsula, though necessary, is insufficient if scholars are to truly reconfigure [End Page 196] the discipline of peninsular studies. Drawing on the Mediterranean and North African dimensions of Iberian subjectivity, Pérez argued that if scholars fail to question the terms in which Iberian Studies have been conceived, they in effect promote a new paradigm that is already obsolete. In “¿Cómo y desde qué posiciones hermenéuticas e ideológicas hablamos de Estudios Ibéricos?” the third speaker, Silvia Bermúdez (University of California, Santa Barbara) developed reflections first presented in May 2012 at the First Annual UC Comparative Iberian Studies Symposium, hosted at UC Davis. Her paper assessed how Iberian Studies can be a useful transcultural paradigm for understanding the diversity and complexity of the geopolitical space constituted by the Iberian Peninsula. The final speaker, Robert Patrick Newcomb (University of California, Davis), addressed “Iberianism’s Lessons.” Newcomb discussed schemes developed by prominent fin-de-siècle Portuguese and Spanish writers to foster closer and more equitable political, economic, and cultural relations between the Iberian Peninsula’s component peoples...

En torno a Utrecht y Aquisgrán: el pensamiento político-económico español sobre asiento de negros y navío de permiso (1701-1750)

The work has three clearly objectives. First, the necessity to apply a new compared perspective, interdisciplinary view and long terms; second, to reconsider the hypothesis of the non existence of a political and economic thought of the Spanish writers on the «asiento de negros» and the «navio de permiso» in Spain; and third, to establish interesting conjunctures, specially between 1725 and 1727, the more or less continuous political-econo mic thought until 1750.

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Saint Theresa of Avila lived in Spain, during the complicated XVIth century. A life of obedience, dedicated to writing and to the foundation of Carmelite monasteries. The present interview (a modest homage upon the celebration of 500 years since the birth of the saint) allows us to approach the life and works of a top rank personality of the Occidental religious literature from the perspective of a translator, more precisely from the perspective of the man who transposed her words into Romanian. A specialist in Arabic language and literature, a novelist and translator from Italian, Catalan, French, Arabic, Spanish, Portuguese, Irish and English, Christian Tamaș published, between 1994 and 1998, four of the main works of the Spanish writer, being the first to present her thoughts and ideas to the Romanian reader at that time. A lucid witness of times when openness and intelectual curiosity were highly valued, the translator evokes certain aspects regarding the way in which she has been perceived in Romania, pinpointing the difficulty of the Theresian text and speaking of the role of religious translation, the present state of the act of reading, the lights and shadows of a society —the modern day, Romanian one.

Remaking Poetics After Postmodernism: Intertextuality, Intermediality, and Cultural Circulation in the Wake of Borges

This article examines how El hacedor (de Borges), Remake (2011) by the Spanish writer Agustín Fernández Mallo, a remake of Jorge Luis Borges's El hacedor (1960), constitutes an extremely relevant manifestation of contemporary poetics and transnational literature. I analyze the formal and conceptual relation between Fernández Mallo's version and Borges's original work and key theoretical implications connected to the removal of El hacedor (de Borges), Remake from publishing markets world-wide soon after its publication. By focusing on the concepts of intertextuality, intermediality, and transnational cultural circulation, I examine from a comparative perspective how Fernández Mallo's remake closely relates to Jeffrey Nealon's notion of “post-postmodernism”—as the contemporary cultural logic of neoliberal global capitalism—and to the transnational process of cultural exchange that Benjamin Lee and Edward LiPuma have defined as “cultures of circulation.”

The Ingenious Simpleton: Upending Imposed Ideologies through Brief Comic Theatre by Delia Méndez Montesinos (review)

Delia Mendez Montesinos. The Ingenious Simpleton: Upending Imposed Ideologies through Brief Comic Theatre. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2014. Pp. xvi + 146. $29.99. In The Ingenious Simpleton, Delia Mendez Montesinos analyzes the subversive potential of brief comic theater and popular performance, and documents its persistent ability to resist submission to hierarchical, social stratification. Through comedy, lower and marginalized classes, who often are subjected to a negative self-concept imposed by hegemonic power interested in sustaining itself, find outlets to transgress socially prescribed norms. Mendez Montesinos's valuable study concerns itself particularly with popular performances that feature a buffoon or comic simpleton, and develops case studies from three geographical regions (Spain, Mexico, and California) across disparate chronological periods. Ultimately, this study reveals a heritage of subversive comedy in twentieth-century Hispanic popular performance that can be traced to the origins of the comic simpleton figure in sixteenth-century Spain. The authors main contention is not that these kinds of politically subversive performances arise only under particular or special social circumstances, but that they can and do exist in a variety of historical, social, and political environments. The subversion of norms through comic performance is a common denominator that reveals a pervasive and enduring tradition across time. Proposing that theatre can be a powerful tool to provide marginalized groups with a needed sense of solidarity and self-worth (xi), the book's brief introduction establishes its central argument by way of the specific historical examples of Lope de Ruedas pasos as mass entertainment in sixteenth-century Spain, post-Revolutionary Mexican satirical public performance (a tradition the author sees dating to pre-Columbian times), and the Teatro Campesino among the grape-harvesters of California's San Joaquin Valley in the 1960s. The book's first chapter outlines the theoretical parameters of the study, introducing definitions of laughter and comedy in both social and theatrical contexts. Here, Mendez Montesinos provides a brief historical overview of the comic figure of the fool, its relationship to laughter (particularly in the context of the carnivalesque), and its social and theatrical roles, beginning in the early modern period. The author cites Erasmus and Shakespeare as examples of early modern authors who developed the figure of the fool; she might also have discussed equally important Spanish writers, such as Cervantes, or the popular tradition of performed entremeses and teatro breve of early modern Spain in order to provide a firmer foundation for her otherwise sound historical analysis. Mendez Montesinos's approach to laughter is largely Bakhtinian, although she also includes references to Henri Bergson, Jacques LeGoif, Thomas Hobbes, Sigmund Freud, and others. This relatively schematic overview of the history of theories of laughter summarizes well-known scholarship on the topic and highlights an important connection between the fool's marginalized perspective and the figure's ability to express or reveal truths through comic illusion, in keeping with Aritsotle's conception of eutrapelia. Throughout this chapter, Mendez Montesinos relies on a distinction between artificial and natural fools in an early modern context, claiming that the ruling classes allowed social transgression by fools because they considered their mockery to be unintentional, or because they accepted fools as mentally and/or physically inferior beings. While this discussion seems overly essentialist at times, it does serve to articulate the importance of the fool's freedom to speak, and often to speak the truth, which characterizes this stock type from its earliest appearances on the comic stage. Mendez Montesinos then defines various types of comedy, largely following the six points of Maurice Charney's metaphysics of comedy: 1) the discontinuous, 2) the accidental, 3) the autonomous, 4) the self-conscious, 5) the histrionic, and 6) the ironic. …

Lope de Vega and the «lindo»: Satire and Masculinity in «De cosario a cosario»

This article examines how Lope de Vega used one of the most prevalent satirical targets in the comedia nueva: the lindo. To do so, we will begin by briefly presenting a series of concepts —such as the difference between gender and sex—, belonging to the field of Masculinity Studies, which are very useful when analyzing Lope’s lindos. Then we will study what was a lindo for Golden Age Spanish writers, and we will focus on one of his traits: his hairdo, adorned with guedejas (long locks), tufos (ear-covering curly locks) and copetes (tupés). After having noticed these dos in other woks by Lope (such as the Rimas de Tomé de Burguillos), we examine them in an urban comedy of his, De cosario a cosario, a play in which the lindos are essential to the main plot. By analyzing it, we discover that, more than portraying an existing type, Lope contributed to create a ridiculous figure that was perpetuated in the literature of the time, and that he used to criticize the youth culture of his time, whose poetic and dramatic taste he found equally awful.

Anthony Sherley’s Spanish Writings and the Global Early Modern

Sir Anthony Sherley was an Elizabethan and Stuart traveler and adventurer who served a notable number of statesmen in Europe and Persia between 1587 and circa 1630. During the last stage of his life, and after becoming a Catholic, he settled in Spain and wrote in Spanish two political and economic reports addressing Spain’s global role in the world. These two texts, which shed some light on the last stage of Sir Anthony’s life and on the nature of Anglo-Spanish relations during the reigns of King James and Kings Philip III and Philip IV, help us understand the complex figure of Sir Anthony and his participation in what we may call the global early modern—that is, the new cosmopolitanism that made seventeenth-century England and Spain engage with imagined and real worlds elsewhere.

Maninbo: Peace & War by Ko Un

or “t” to another, like spinning subatomic particles excited by an accelerator. This passage also suggests the epic dimensions of Streaming. The breadth, the depth, the historical and cultural reach, and the preternatural musings of the collection as a whole demand it be read as an epic poem, both in the sense of heightened language and in terms of its ambition. Two long poems, “Burn” and “Streaming ,” both of which are “mini-epics,” are placed in structurally equivalent positions in the collection. “Streaming” is the second poem in the collection, following the “Prelude ,” an elegy for the poet’s mother (the invocation of her mother as muse?). “Burn” is the penultimate poem, followed by a “Coda” entitled “Harp Strings.” “Streaming ” also makes use of refrains, which, when thinking of the collection as an epic, have the feel of strophe and antistrophe, especially when at the end of the poem they are combined into an epode. Despite its epic structure, Streaming is a lucid, intimate collection, one in which the heroes and the villains are people we know, where a butterfly and a wildfire take the place of the gods. Jeanetta Calhoun Mish Oklahoma City University Ko Un. Maninbo: Peace & War. Brother Anthony of Taizé & Lee Sang-Wha, tr. Hexham, Northumberland. Bloodaxe Books / Dufour Editions. 2015. isbn 9781780372426 Imagine: a young man is forced into compulsory labor while the civil war that rages around him kills millions of his compatriots ; when the conflict concludes, he spends the next decade a Buddhist monk, turning his back on the world; returning but filled with despair, he lurches toward alcoholism then suicide; he fails (several attempts) but is energized by a surging democratization movement and becomes a leading dissident ; over two decades he is imprisoned four times for parapolitical activities; he is accused of treason and sentenced to twenty years in prison, where he is tortured and beaten; he is pardoned, eventually, and becomes a father at fifty; all the while, prodigious numbers of his books are published —over 150 at last count—including the sprawling, thirty-volume Maninbo (Ten Thousand Lives, 2005), which is, the poet tells us, “a collection of songs about the people I have come to know in this world.” The Bloodaxe edition brings new translations from volumes 11–20 into English, and these focus “on the sufferings of the Korean people during the Korean War”; to Ko Un, this was a conflict that stole: “the clarity in the eyes / Of people in autumn’s cool wind. / Gradually, / Not only the eyes of people / But of cows and horses in the stony fields.” The poet describes his oeuvre as “popular historical poetry,” and the more than two hundred poems in this book are each marked by moments of trauma; populated by students, doctors, jailers, drunks, dignitaries , dictators, rapists, rightists, leftists, police spies, dogs, refugees, daughters, et al., this book enumerates the human costs of ideological displacement endured by Koreans across the twentieth century. The poems are, essentially, elegies: “Since Liberation , Korea has been a land of blood. / Every single nook and cranny of our whole peninsula / Has become a cursed place . . .” And so this volume serves as a testimony, a monumental feat of remembrance memorializing the lives of ordinary people interrupted by extraordinary events. Musing on an earlier English-language translation of Maninbo (volumes 1–10, published by Green Integer in 2005), Robert Hass recalls a comment from Czesław Miłosz: “Woe to the poet born to an interesting piece of geography in a violent time.” Striding across the Korean peninsula, Ko Un is a literary giant once described by Care Santos Dissection Lawrence Schimel, tr. A Midsummer Night’s Press This collection of poems about relationships written by Spanish writer Care Santos is filled with intense language that perfectly captures the joy, hearbreak, and pain which come from being a woman in love. Crisp lines, a clever theme, and a beautiful sense of emotion tie each separate yet connected poem together. Sergio Ramírez Divine Punishment Nick Caistor & Hebe Powell, tr. McPherson & Company Set in Nicaragua, this genre-defying novel is considered one of the greatest literary works to come from Central America. Focusing on a famous 1933 trial, the book...

La dualidad en el poema "El Dios ibero" de Antonia Machado

The Generation of ’98 was the name of a group of Spanish writers born between 1864 and 1875 whose common feature was the influence caused by the Hispanic crisis of 1898. Most of these authors tried to propose solutions through their writings. Antonio Machado’s poem “The Iberian God” was placed in this context. The poet, through a game of dualities, describes the unsettled God that determines the religiosity of the Hispanic man and suggests the god he yearns for, a firm and grim god, shaped by the Iberian man in a piece of Castilian oak, symbol of Spanish unity.

Recurso estilísticos en la producción narrativa de las novelas Bartleby y compañía y El mal de Montano de Enrique Vila-Matas

In this paper we attempt to analyze the stylistic resources used by the Spanish writer Enrique Vila-Matas in the construction of his novels Bartleby & Co., and El mal de Montano. We focus on the use of certain aspects of intertextual mechanisms, displayed in the development of the fable, which gave rise to these novels. Thus, we reflect on the construction of the characters, as well as on their relationship to both the archive and literary tradition.

Los sonetos a la muerte del rayo del septentrión: Lope de Vega y Quevedo sobre Gustavo Adolfo de Suecia

This articles examines how two Golden Age Spanish writers, Lope de Vega and Francisco de Quevedo, interpreted the figure of king Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden and how they received the news of his death in two sonnets dedicated to it. By examining the texts together, we contrast which images and structures the poets used, and how that style reflected the emotions they wanted to evoke and the tradition in which they chose to inscribe themselves. After a short review of the funeral tradition in poetry, we examine the controversy around Gustavus Adolphus and analyze Lope’s sonnet--focusing on the changes between the 1632 and 1634 versions--and Quevedo’s. Comparing them, we learn that the two writers chose some parallel images and, above all, the same leitmotiv: a condemnation of ambition.

Un tratado inédito sobre la idea de nobleza atribuido a Francisco de Rades y Andrada

This article presents an edition and commentary of what appears to be the opening chapters of a treatise on the idea of nobility (and the definition of several concepts related to it) attributed to Francisco de Rades y Andrada, chronicler of the military orders. The text, written before 1599, is contained in a manuscript of the National Library of Spain in the company of several significant texts related to the genealogy and history of the Sarmiento family (that of the dedicatee of the treatise, don Diego Sarmiento de Acuna ) and Renaissance copies of two medieval texts quite relevant in the history of reflections on nobility in Spain: a) the Spanish translation of a famous speech by Alonso de Cartagena at the Council of Basel in 1434; b) the Spanish version by Charles, Prince of Viana, of De vera nobilitate (written by Buonaccorso da Montemagno ca. 1429, translated into Italian by Angelo Decembrio for Inigo Lopez de Mendoza, Marques de Santillana). These, together with a list of Knights of Calatrava admitted to the order between 1535 and 1595, could be supplementary material for Rades’ Chronicle of the Military Orders (1572), and look very congenial with the activities and attitudes of Rades as historian: always faithful to legislation and medieval documents and contemptuous of the fantasies and philological and historical inaccuracies frequently found in Sixteenth- Century Spanish writers on the concept and implications of nobility.

Melchor Almagro San Martín y sus colaboraciones en revistas literarias de su primera etapa (1896-1914)

El presente artículo constituye un repaso de las colaboraciones en revistas literarias de la primera etapa (1896-1914) del escritor Melchor Almagro San Martín (1881-1947), quien destacó en el género de la pequeña historia y mantuvo durante toda su vida una muy activa y fecunda relación con la prensa escrita, en sus más diversas variantes.

Literatura y literatos españoles en la revista Les Matinées Espagnoles (Madrid-París, 1883-1888)

Descripción y estudio de los artículos de escritores españoles que aparecieron en la revista Les Matinées Espagnoles, publicada entre Madrid y París de 1883 a 1888 (antes de convertirse en la Nouvelle Revue Internationale), que contó entre sus colaboradores habituales a personajes como E. Castelar y E. Pardo Bazán. La revista, dirigida por Marie Létizia de Rute y con la mayoría de textos en francés, no ha sido usualmente considerada española, extremo que el autor intenta asimismo justificar.

‘Such is Glorious War’: British Reflections on the Peninsular War in Spain (1808–1814)

Recent studies on the incorporation of the War of Independence in Spanish literature have provided invaluable insights into the way Spanish writers integrated that terrible conflict into their work. However, another curious angle of the conflict has generally been passed over by students of literary and cultural studies: the view of the Peninsular War voiced by its English-speaking participants. Dozens of memoirs, diaries and histories have been published in multiple languages that attempt to reconstruct, remember, or justify the events of the War. Among the thousands of soldiers who ended up on the Peninsula was a young Irish lad named Robert Blakeney (1789–1858), whose memoir, A Boy in the Peninsular War, offers vivid details about his experiences as a soldier in major battles during the War of Independence. It provides us with an insider's view of a conflict that shook Europe, galvanized Spain, and wove itself into the fabric of Spanish history for more than two hundred years.

The Disappeared as a Transnational Figure or How to Deal with theVain Yesterday

This article examines the figure of the desaparecido as a transnational symbol, focusing on the ‘success’ this figure has had in the contemporary debate about memory in Spain. Taken from the repressive context of the dictatorships of the 1970s in South America, the disappeared have travelled to the Spain of the twenty-first century, where they are progressively replacing the former ‘fusilados y paseados’ of the Franco Regime. After charting the ways in which the term has been used in the public debate, we analyse the figure of the disappeared in the novel,El vano ayer, by the Spanish writer Isaac Rosa.

Writers' positioning in literature reviews in English and Spanish computing doctoral theses

Making appropriate reference to other texts is an essential feature of successful academic writing (Hyland, 2000; Myers, 1990). Writers are expected to integrate others' ideas into their arguments to indicate what is already known about the area of study of the discipline, or to point out weaknesses, aligning themselves with a particular disciplinary framework (Thompson & Tribble, 2001). Literature reviews (LRs) of PhD theses provide support for the writer's position and show the novelty of her/his work. This study analysed the resources of evaluation at both rhetorical and linguistic levels used by the writers of 20 PhD LRs in computing in English and Spanish. The data reveal that the Spanish and the English PhD LRs have a similar rhetorical structure. However, the English writers use more strategies for the development of each move than the Spanish writers. Attitude markers are the most usual devices doctoral writers use to express opinion in both sets. Epistemic modality and a variety of discourse-based markers are typically found in the English LRs while the Spanish LRs seem to rely mainly on adversatives and certainty markers. Differences respond partly to individual writing styles, but also reflect rhetorical variation in the relationship with the audience.